Chris Pederick Ripped Off

Tuesday, Aug. 23 2005 | Author: jeremy

If you use Firefox and are a web designer, you more than likely use the superb Web Developer Toolbar developed by Chris Pederick. It looks like his Firefox toolbar has been ripped off as an Internet Explorer add-on.

A company named Aevita recently announced a new add-on for Internet Explorer called Web Inspector. I will let Chris take it from here.

It sounds like an equivalent to the Web Developer extension only for Internet Explorer instead of Mozilla Firefox, but a quick glance at it’s home page reveals it is more of a rip-off than an equivalent.

The first thing I noticed was that the icons used in Web Inspector are identical to those in Web Developer. These icons were not created by me, but are part of the default Mozilla Firefox themes on Windows and Mac OS X, and I believe these icons are copyrighted by Mozilla.

In addition to using the stock Mozilla icons, they also liked the order of menu options that they took that as well (as can be seen in this screenshot).

They even ripped off the documentation, copying this bit of text directly from the Web Developer documentation: ” The disable features allow the disabling of various browser behaviors including disabling the cache, JavaScript and CSS.”

What is particularly amusing about this is that the text was copied verbatim even though there is no feature that disables the cache in Web Inspector! The Web Inspector home page also claims that the program allows “an unlimited number of configurable tools” and “custom sizes” in the resize feature, but these are features of the Web Developer extension and are not included in Web Inspector.

I picked this story up from Asa Dotzler, and I will do the same as he has, encouraging the readers of FG to contact Aevita and voice your disgust at their blatant rip-off of Chris Pederick’s hard work. It makes it even worse that they are selling their product for $25.

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8 Responses for "Chris Pederick Ripped Off"

Matt

August 24th, 2005 at 12:10 am
1

Ho-ly! That is completely unreal. Hopefully they get their asses sued off. The least the could have done was change the icons.

Definitely going to support help Chris and ‘contact’ Aevita now.

…lastly, what designer/developer uses IE as their primary browser when building a site?
blu

August 24th, 2005 at 12:32 am
2

Why couldn’t they have ripped it off for Safari?

(okay, just kidding…)
Clint

August 24th, 2005 at 1:17 am
3

Why not let the GPL do its dirty work? The extension is GPLed (http://chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/documentation/other/source/) so the derivative is also GPLed. Aevita is totally welcome to copy the extension and charge for it (the icons probably are a different story). However, the GPL gives freedom of re-distribution to everyone else. Why not give Aevita a taste of their own medicine? At least the IE folks have a good toolbar finally.
cliche

August 24th, 2005 at 9:04 am
4

I wonder why they used the ‘download’ icon for ‘tools’. It doesn’t look anything like ‘tools’. Lazyness?
Doug Clifton

August 25th, 2005 at 1:19 am
5

Did anyone check the software to make sure it follows the GPL? It should also provide source, and give attribution to Chris. Maybe the IE people now have decent toolbar for Web developement, but it’s still IE. Shudder.
Doug Clifton

August 25th, 2005 at 1:23 am
6

Hahahahahaha, “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded” error coming from the Aevita Web site. Too funny…
Allan Mullan

October 1st, 2005 at 6:01 pm
7

Hmmm well now looks like they’ve taken the product off the shelf :-)

Chris made an excellent product, who wouldn’t want to take credit it for it… But credit should go where credit is due and now they’ve obviously figured that one out :-)

The weird thing is that, with Open Source, they could have ported it across to IE, followed the GPL and still taken credit for porting it.. Ah well, their bad I guess.
sigac

October 4th, 2006 at 7:02 am
8

Chris
You may have thought of this ?
Why don’t you contact them, may be they will pay you to use it, it does not interdict any GPL rights but allows you to make some money.
SGC