More than two weeks after being hacked, the Bharatiya Janata Party website on Friday came out of its “maintenance” mode however came under fire from a Nellore-based website development company which accused the party of using one of their web designs for their revamped website “without paying and giving no credit whatsoever to w3Layouts”.
In a blog post, w3Layouts said that the party ripped off its work and removed a line that gave the necessary credit.
“Why world’s largest and India’s ruling political party plagiarised our work without giving us credit?” the company said in a blog, detailing their charge, “We, at W3Layouts, were initially happy and excited that BJP IT cell was using our template, then devastated to see our work being used by BJP removing the backlink without paying, and giving no credit whatsoever to W3Layouts.”
The start-up also brought the issue to the BJP’s notice via Twitter.
“@BJP4India please ask your team to read the license terms https://w3layouts.com/license/ before removing “designed by w3layouts”? Please provide your IT Team Email id will have a word,” the startup posted.
After the tweet went to the BJP, “they removed the code where ever w3layouts was mentioned”.
“While the visible backlinks were removed, it was clear that BJP was still using the W3layouts code as it was evident in the source code of the page,” informed the startup.
As per few reports, a BJP official, who declined to be named, said ”Their code was dropped after they insisted on a backlink, as it is not something we do in the normal course. We had offered to mention their name but since it didn’t find favour, we preferred to work with an alternate solution. It was a free-to-use application.”
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