Yeah, but the appropriate reaction was to talk to anyone at Mozilla before writing a public blog post in a fairly transparent attempt to get some free PR.

Ahem, I appreciate that Mozilla is on the side of the angels and all, but after you create one of the most notable pieces of software in the world, take eight figures a year from Google for advertising, and zealously protect your own trademarks, you cease to get my "Oh, small company doesn't understand how IP works -- well, time for a quick private chitchat to rectify their understanding" latitude with regards to infringement.

P.S. Contrast this with how we collectively reacted when a Microsoft partner ripped off Plurk's design.

Apples and oranges. Plurk's entire UI, code and all, was stolen and launched as a competing product.

And if nothing was said, do you think that Mozilla would have made their own design up or simply continued with the stolen one?

Apparently, they had already ditched the design. [http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/09/metalab-accuses-mozilla-of-...]

It could very well be that I'm tired and missing something, but I don't see where it says that in the TC article. And I don't personally run Firefox, so I can't go through the pages of designs on the page linked to in the TC quote to verify this myself.

FTA (emphasis mine): Mozilla is now aware of a post by MetaLab that shows a Mozilla developer copying prior design work. The mockups they cite were an early proof of concept created by cut-and-paste, never final designs. Mozilla respects the hard work of all designers and at no time meant to plagiarize original content. The in-progress designs for the Jetpack SDK’s IDE are available here and following initial sign-off on the proof of concept, the IDE was developed entirely independent of MetaLabs’ work.

The Microsoft partner in question actually launched their design.

Ie, they got caught later.

Mozilla employees ought to know the policy and understand how it applies to what they do on the wiki. On that we can agree. But when one fails to follow the policy, and in the absence of any other evidence, is it reasonable to assume that they willfully did so?

When it's a ripoff of design work by a company Mozilla opted not to pay?

Yes, yes it is.