Forget about who is copying who. In software everyone borrows ideas from others (Microsoft is the first one).
That happens because those “original” ideas are already discussed in the developer community (research papers, conferences, newgroups, prototypes…) a long time before a product comes out to the market.

A lot of effects in Beryl or XGl comes from other projects and experiments, that predates Vista (so it’s very probable that Vista designers/developers borrowed ideas from there).

And about the themes that are similar to Windows… that always happens (there is also a lot of themes similar to OSX too).
A lot of these themes are created by individuals, just for fun. It’s like saying: “hey look, I made a thing that looks like a expensive commercial soft X, in my spare time”

The Slash Dotters usual view that all this “eye candy” is useless junk just proves the point. If you think about a computer in terms of computing theory then all a computer is is a machine that transitions between states in response to input; FSM’s, PDA’s, and Turing Machines show us this much. This is a particularly useless device unless people can harness the state transitions for their own purpose. To do this people need to communicate with the computer and the computer with them; the mechanism for this communication is the user interface. Thus, the user interface is really governed by information theory, psychology, and semiotics.

Considering one concept that information theory gives us, that of channel capacity, we see that the whole UI can actually be used to communicate information. So, if the “eye candy” has semantic concepts mapped on to it then it’s actually serving a valid purpose as a communications mechanism. Console programs, on the other hand, are actually very poor in terms of communicating information efficiently. Text only takes up a fraction of the UI leaving the rest of the UI communicating nothing.

Finally, even “eye candy” communicates something. “Eye candy”, which is a term I really hate as it seems to have been developed by complete morons who don’t understand communication, communicates something about how much effort has been put into creating something. We associate good presentation with a lot of effort. We can then use some algebra to work out how much effort has gone into the internal mechanics of something. The equation is:
total effort = effort put into UI + effort put into mechanics
We also relate the total effort to the price tag of something. This is why people don’t trust things that only have a moderate price tag but that look really flashy. If you buy a top of the range sports car then you expect it to have more effort put into it, and thus a bigger price tag, than your average family saloon; therefore, you expect it to have better aesthetics and mechanics.

Will