Alexa bites the hand that feeds it

Remember Alexa?  Ron Hornbaker liked it, but found its interface clumsy, so he made a better Alexa interface.  Amazon subsequently copied many of Hornbaker's improvements and incorporated them into Alexa.  Now, after stealing his interface designs, Amazon is sueing Hornbaker for supposedly stealing data from Alexa — data that Amazon got for free from users who volunteer to run Amazon's Alexa Toolbar.

Says Alan Graham:

Excuse me?  Little Ron Hornbaker…is causing giant Alexa irreparable harm?  And the question that really begs to be asked is that why all of a sudden, over a year later, when Alexa had ample opportunity to address this issue, did they decide to do it now?  The simple fact of the matter is that Ron Hornbaker built a better Alexa and as soon as it started to gain traction, and Alexa had already borrowed all the ideas it wanted from Alexaholic, they no longer needed it.  Essentially, what Alexa wants from the lawsuit is to take ownership of the Alexaholic domain, stop Ron Hornbaker from accessing their site without written permission, damages which will go well into the hundreds of thousands, pay their legal fees, and crawl into a hole somewhere and never show his head again.

Is this how we work together in this shiny new world of Web 2.0?  Now I know that Alexa will take the position that they have certain intellectual property and a trademark issue.  They will claim that people will mistake Statsaholic with Alexa.  But the simple fact that we've seen time and time again is that companies that lock themselves behind walls fail, and companies who open their technology in the spirit of cooperation succeed.  Can you imagine the state of the internet today if Google had kept all their API's hidden from the world, impossible to access and mashup?  What if, as Tim O'Reilly postulated…Google had gone left instead of right?  What if instead of saying "cool" when the first mashups started popping up, Google instead called in their lawyers?  What would the web look like now if that had happened?

Amazon is not only doing the dirty to Ron Hornbaker here.  They are also, whether they intend to or not, sending a message to every Alexa user saying "We expect you to give us this data for free in return for using our Alexa service, but god help you if you try to actually use our service."

This is the time for Alexa users to stand up and say, "Well, fuck you then.  Bad Amazon.  No data for you!" and uninstall that Alexa toolbar.  You never know, you might be the next one Amazon decides to sue.

(Link from mrmeval)