By John Gruber
WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, supporting SSO, SCIM, user management, and RBAC.
Looking through the “gallery” of demo apps built with Google App Engine, the only one that seems more than half-baked is HuddleChat, written by Google employees Darren Delaye, Braden Kowitz, and Kyle Consalus. But HuddleChat is just a feature-for-feature clone of 37signals’s Campfire. The layout is the same, the tabs at the top of the screen are the same, the right-side sidebar listing participants and file uploads is the same. It even copies Campfire’s trick of formatting a message as “code” if it contains literal newline characters.
Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong. And it’s creepy, in a Microsoft-of-the-’90s way, when it’s a $150 billion company cloning an app from a 10-person company.
★ Tuesday, 8 April 2008