To "steal" effectively (in the Steve Jobs sense) means to pull details into your own work that are invisible to the naked eye. E.g., I'm going to "steal" the concept for DuckDB's new quack protocol as inspiration for handling a similar issue in my own embedded DB. It will exist as its own implementation/code, but the central idea or "aha" is what's "stolen."
Stealing is stealing unless you're really good at it.
I would say that there is a big difference between stealing without acknowledgement, and stealing with acknowledgement and actively learning through reverse engineering.
Stealing in this context might be tad harsh.
Others have said it, but I'm not a fan of the cookie cutter approach. Build on UX patterns that work, but try new things too. It'll be hard to let your brand infuse the design when you're doing a line for line reproduction.
(Joking, mostly) but we did see this with Wordpress, Bootstrap, etc. the masses converge on simple web experiences because it’s pretty easy to get something that “just works”.
Still hurts to be the one being stolen from though.
If you're being a great artist who steals you may perfectly reproduce something, but in such a different and novel context that it feels fresh, or taking something verbatim and then modifying it with your work, vs say taking an series of ideas from a work and then not really changing or moving from what they were originally expressing
An example of this is from Offworld Trading Company[0], which literally started by copying the market from Age of Empires[1] and then iterated on it as well as the auction mechanics from MULE[2], I vaguely recall them talking about this in their GDC talk[3], though I could be misremembering that(it's a good talk though)
I could be wrong, but I'm not sure if anyone who was stolen from in those cases feels hurt by it
Compare that to stealing, where the parties stolen from were really quite angry at what was stolen, Triple Town vs Yeti Town[4], which very much looked like a lazy clone
-[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/271240/Offworld_Trading_C...
-[1]: https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Market_(Age_of_Empires_...
-[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.L.E.
-[3]: Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2C4z_apu2I
-[4]: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/spry-fox-and-the-clone-wars
Good artists see an idea and use it. Great artists see an idea and _make it their own_.