> Just because a product uses open technology, it doesn't necessarily undermine the labour and creative skill that a person puts into creating a product from the open technology available.

I never said it did, and that's what's unfortunate about this situation. His service has no backend that could not be easily replicated, and the frontend is portable. You cannot build software like this without being copied... by nature it is not practical to expect to limit others' behavior with open platform code. There are no laws that will protect you from sufficient copying effort.

Whether the person is skilled or not is another issue. The OP would still be mad if somebody ripped off his website and made it just different enough.

Ah I see - yes, I take your point. I agree that if it is easily available, it is likely to be copied, such is the reality of human nature. Unfortunately, it does rather incentivise keeping things locked up which is a shame in some respects in terms of increasing knowledge. Some times the best way of protecting your innovation is simply not to disclose.

I agree that most people have an emotional connection to their product and if someone designed around it, it would still hurt. However, this process would take time and is the nature of competition. As such, the impact can't be as great as in the instant case where the infringer has just ported the whole platform.

> non-open source

"Open source" does not mean "you can view the source". It means software that is freely usable and redistributable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines...

The link has a section that says "Inclusion of source code".

I am not an open source expert but I always understood that open source software comes with source code for anyone to view. I could be wrong but would like to confirm this.

All open source software has the source code available. But the availability of source code does not mean that it's open source. You can put a very restrictive license on software with the source code available.

Thank you for the correction. Is there a term to describe code which although freely viewable is not open-source?

Proprietary.

But that for me doesn't capture the aspect of it being freely available to examine/read - perhaps such a term doesn't exist!

Minified JavaScript is only marginally easier to read than disassembled/decompiled binaries.

I don't think there's one term. "An application with exposed/visible source code", maybe.

The term "shared source" exists, and sort-of covers this scenario:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Reciprocal_License#Mi...

"Source-available"

No, that's free software. Open source just means that the source code is freely usable. It doesn't mean that it has a copyleft license.

The definitions are quite similar, actually:

http://opensource.org/osd.html

As you can see, it's based on Debian's guidelines.

Open Source includes copyleft (GPL) licenses, but also BSD/MIT/Apache and others as well.

I would consider those very different, actually. When you only allow copyleft licenses you become a social movement, whereas open source is a software development methodology.

Edit: I must be way out of date, or something. I was under the impression that all Free Software had to have a requirement that derivative works also be published under a Free Software license. This doesn't seem to be true. I would agree, then, that they are basically the same.

Yes, but in practical terms, the amount of code that is one, but not the other is either small or nonexistant.

The original poster thought that open source simply meant 'source code available', which I corrected. You are going off on a tangent.