

Ask HN: Is ethic to copy applications ideas to target different language users. - pdelgallego

This is the third time that this happens to me, in a period of two years.<p>This weekend I copied a Facebook application that it has been growing pretty fast since sunday (2000 users in 36 hours and counting).<p>The motivation of copying the application, was mainly to include something in portfolio, and learn some techs that I am interesting in, but also because most of my friends and relatives are non English speakers, so there are many of them will never use it if the application is not their native language.<p>The UI is not the same, and obviously the source code is completely mine, but the idea its the same.<p>I feel like I am kind of cheating, specially cheating to my self. What do you think? It is legit to copy other ideas to target different markets.  Do you think is a good idea as business model to copy "successful" ideas to target other markets.
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candeira
Is it immoral to open a pizza restaurant in your city after travelling to
Italy/New York/Buenos Aires/anywhere else?

At least until we have good automatic translation, human languages are the new
locations. If nobody else is serving your locality, setting up shop there is
not only ethical, but virtuous. You are serving the underserved.

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jacquesm
If that's cheating 99% of the businesses out there are cheating. It's called
competition and it's healthy. Ideas are not protected in any way shape or form
and if you copy an existing idea and adapt it to a new market then that's just
fine.

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gyardley
It's a tried and true model.

Here's a fun example - just a few weeks ago I learned that my current company
(flurry.com) has a pretty decent Chinese clone (umeng.com), backed by the
incubator that Kai-Fu Lee started.

If the former head of Google China can do this, I figure you can do it too.

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revorad
<http://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html>

