Jolie O'Dell at VentureBeat wrote a post about Curebit's theft of code from 37signals' Highrise site. And apparently there was a hullabaloo about it on Twitter, as DHH from 37signals got his panties supremely bunched over the whole thing. Frankly, I'm not sure why he's so upset.

Okay, I gotta agree that Curebit actually using Highrise's assets straight off their server is a big no-no. But honestly, that's part of what makes me think that it might really have been a genuine mistake rather than intentional theft, because no one in their right mind would do that. And now they've changed the site, and apologized. That didn't stop DHH from losing his shit all over Twitter, but that doesn't seem particularly out of character for him, either.

Let's be honest: the design isn't that complex or innovative. I don't know which should be more embarrassed by that, the guy who's flipping out that someone stole his basic layout, or the guy who stole it. But as was pointed out in the VentureBeat blog comments, any designer could write that code from scratch inside of a couple hours. We're not talking about anything all that cutting edge or unique. Further honesty, if it was my site, I wouldn't have been able to resist switching out the images to show up as something inflammatory on the other site. And then I would have taken screenshots and giggled my butt off.

But this is the very best part—also in the blog comments, everyone admits to copying code from other sites, even Jolie O'Dell. So, wait, what's the fuss all about then? Oh yeah, it's because it's 37signals. Anointed by God, they are the walking-on-water-est firm ever created. I'll admit that I do kinda like a nice, spare design myself, so I've got nothing against their site layouts, I even like them. But for god's sake, let's not pretend they're anything all that special.

By the way, guys, I read your book, ReWork, and it wasn't all that. I never even quite got all the way through, too much rah-rah redundancy. So maybe you should just get over yourselves.