Mozilla today posted a public apology to design firm MetaLab over a design mockup for a new Jetpack feature.
Jetpack Flightdeck is an upcoming feature that is intended to make it easier for developers to build next generation extensions for Mozilla’s open source Firefox web browser. The problem is that Mozilla used some design element from a third party design shop called MetaLab — without any kind of attribution.
“While the design direction being implemented does not
utilize these design elements, we inadvertently included the early
mockups in our
blog post and video announcing the next phase of development for
the Jetpack
SDK,” Mozilla stated in a blog post. “We’ve since removed all of the early mockups from our web sites, and
updated the videos and screenshots with the correct content.”
Yes, Mozilla messed up and yes they did the right thing here by apologizing.
Taking a broader look at this issue though, Mozilla is all about open source code and as such using and re-using items is common place. So long of course as those elements are open source and even then attribution (in code or otherwise) is sometimes necessary.
