Having started two companies, as a non tech founder, I can understand why they did this at the start, as there are many other more important things to do than CSS and TOS. But this isn't an excuse as soon as they had the resources to make the change.
> YC promotes launching fast and copying / plagiarism facilitates that.
You don't copy someone's unique look, when they don't want you to copy them. There are so many inexpensive ($12 - $49) CSS templates that look good enough or even cool, that what happened is both inexcusable and just stupid. Most of them are already built to use either bootstrap or foundation as well, so it makes the launching fast part trivial.
> Graham killed the thread, saying that it violated the
> site’s guideline to “not use posts to ask us questions,”
> but he also wrote, “I think they shouldn’t have done
> it, and that they compounded the problem by not taking
> the initial complaints seriously enough.”
That is a convenient and often used response. And also a great way to cap controversies from getting out of hand: just censor them!! Good thing YC owns this forum.
This has happened before with a YC company (http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/28/curebit-apologizes-for-copy...) and YC companies are also known to copy (often verbatim) legalese from a bigger competitor and find / replace with their own company name.
Having started two companies, as a non tech founder, I can understand why they did this at the start, as there are many other more important things to do than CSS and TOS. But this isn't an excuse as soon as they had the resources to make the change.