The Sincerest Form of Flattery
I’ve seen bits and pieces of my site’s design borrowed on other blogs before, but this is probably the closest thing to a direct copy.
I’ve seen people get really angry about this kind of stuff. “How dare you steal my work?!” etc. I can understand that reaction, but that’s really not the reaction I had.
First, this site is licensed under a Creative Commons license. You can create derivative works as long as you supply attribution to me (as I see this site has done down in the footer), you not use it for commercial purposes, and that you license your derivative work under the same license (also, done by this site). I’m not sure that I’ve ever specified if the license applied to the layout, as well as the content of my website, but my assumption would be that unless I make a distinction, it applies universally. It should be noted that the photos shown here via Flickr have their own licenses, and the license of this site does not apply to those.
While the zy.ca site (cool domain, by the way) has copied a lot of stuff via copy/paste, there are a lot of things there that have been recreated. Many of the plugins that control the output of this website are custom plugins that I wrote. The breadcrumbs, for instance, that show “Archives > year > month > day > post-name” are made from a custom plugin that I’ve only shared privately with a few friends. While the output of my blog is visible to the public, most of the code that creates it is not. So I’m actually rather impressed at the effort he put into emulating various aspects of my site.
The cool thing about licensing the site as I have, is that when people make derivative works, they have to be licensed similarly. Thus, there is nothing stopping me from taking any changes or additions he or anyone else might make and merging them back into my design! Information just wants to be free, baby.
