<a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/article/copy-great-designers-steal" rel="nofollow">http://www.sitepoint.com/article/copy-great-designers-steal</a><p>Another article I remember reading a while ago to elaborate on this.<p>Many people think smart designers spend endless hours just going through iteration after iteration of seeing what's good or bad. While iteration exists a lot in design, doing something entirely from scratch is like trying to write a program entirely in a native language, without any frameworks or libraries, and without any open source references to look at.<p>Design isn't as high of a competitive advantage (or really intellectual property) as it's made out to be. It's like trying to say an idea is more important than the execution, it's not. If you feel bad after "stealing" a design and improving it, just remember the famous quote by Bill Gates in Pirates of Silicon Valley:<p>Gates: Every car has a steering wheel, but nobody can call it their own.<p>Of course he was referring to the mouse, the UI, and much of the OS that Microsoft ripped straight from Apple (who in turn ripped it from various R&D groups at larger companies), whose own motto was "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Microsoft played Apple at their own game.