Its not a matter of "that's ok with me". There are many variables to success. If someone else's "Collaborative Shell Client" takes off and mine doesn't, or takes off in a market I haven't or couldn't service well, and I was on the internet first, I need to review many other variables besides just product design.
ahhh...but you see the "software" as 100% of the product. There is so much more to it..especially in the case of community content sites.
In this case, they didn't copy the software. They rewrote it from the ground up with different tools. They did copy almost 100% the look and feel. But that is not 100% of the "product"...far from it.
You clearly have missed everything since it's exactly the opposite. The internal software architecture is not the issue here, the cloned result presented to users/customers is.
and StackOverflow was unabashedly a derivative of Digg or Reddit. The creators have said so themselves.
How closely to a pre-existing design or market space does a product need to be before it offends you? Do you have a methodology to measure this?
How much time have you spent trying to woo venture capital? In my experience, one of the first questions I get hit with is "is there anyone else doing something similar?" If the answer is no, this is a red flag.
A typical and expected elevator pitch is "its like X but for Y". Hybridization is the game here. It is common and quite acceptable to say "its like X but for China".
The creator of this new product did change something...something critical... "its like StackOverflow but for China".
