Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
intuitiveexplanations.com
intuitiveexplanations.com
So a CEO bullied you. He threatened to have lawyers look at something, accused you of behaving poorly, and accused you of being difficult. He is being manipulative. He is trying to guilt / scare you into stopping. And it worked.
For all readers... do not be afraid of lawyers. Especially if nobody has even talked to them yet. Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing agenda. Yet they also must do what their client asks, so lawyers looking into a concern, or even sending nastygrams... those are meaningless actions. It only becomes meaningful if and when if their lawyers indicate they believe they really have a case, or if your own lawyer believes they have a case. Everything before that is posturing and bullying.
If I were in the same situation as OP, I'd state that my intent was positive, ask to be informed of the results of discussions with attorneys, and wish them to have a nice day. Admit no wrong, make no apologies, ignore irrelevant statements (in particular personal attacks), and just let it slide until they take a real action of some kind.
Once they do take an action, then it might be appropriate to do what they want. But seriously... stop letting people be bullies.
They will if they get paid.
(Annoyingly the reason I wouldn't have won that much in damages was that I had mitigated my damages by finding another contract within days)
I think this impression is just a result of how lawyers are portrayed in the media, most folks are quite happy to sit down with someone and talk something through - moreso if it can be done entirely over email or the phone.
I mean I've also suggested at no cost that a site could be built on Squarespace instead of hiring a software engineer too...
They don't need to push it very far to cause a lot of harm to an individual and relatively bury them in costs.
It's true, the US legal system can be hopelessly expensive, but it is still possible to push back before it gets to that point if you're sure you're in the right.
Dude, move on already.
1. What if I'm considering working for Replit? This behaviour would give me second thoughts. 2. Imagine I'm a VC firm deciding whether or not to invest in them. I don't want me money being used to pursue a frivolous lawsuit against a website that isn't a commercial threat and probably isn't using their IP anyway.
In the end, this was a hobby project for the author, and I can understand he might not want to deal with the stress involved with possible legislation. The bully is the aggressor here and lets try not to blame the victim.
We hope, but this is what we got:
> As a matter of principle, when someone goes into your home and steals from you, even if it's not material, you have to respond.
My attorney: Never respond ever.
If yes, please by all means reach out.
It can sometimes hard to tell frivolous vs. serious letters, and ignoring a serious one is not a good idea. Given any sort of emotional attachment to your business, and lack of legal experience, you might not be the best person to judge the situation.
That is true, but most people don't have their "own lawyer" to ask.
Thankfully there are organizations that will take up your legal fight for free in the US.
Fortunately for him, EFF decided to support him afterwards. But do not count on EFF paying for your legal defence.
Links:
https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1385004344903290883
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf...
The quantity and the length of emails sent by the author, in addition to the writeup, suggest they spent considerable time worrying about the situation.
And it’s only been a few days. Imagine if this becomes a multi-year case.
If you sue me, I’ll just say “ok, see you in court, let me know if you need anything for discovery“. You’ll be spending lots of money and I’ll be spending nothing. It’s only expensive for me if I get an attorney, and I don’t need one. What happens if we go to court and lose? I have to take down my website? If there’s one lawyer in town, they drive a Chevrolet. If there’s two lawyers in town, they both drive Cadillacs.
If it goes to a legal proceeding, it is about convincing a stranger and lay-person (i.e. Judge, or perhaps even worse a group of jurors), that you didn't violate the law. You have to do this while the other side is doing their very best to convince the same stranger that you are a devious thief who did irreparable harm to their company and cost them millions in damages (or some other absurdly large number). They will paint everything you did and say as part of your plan to steal from and damage their company. They will have highly qualified experts submit very convincing reports, and testify, that what you did was trade secrete theft, and caused immense damage. Your only defense will be to push your own narrative that can counter all of this, sufficiently to get you off the hook. You'll need at least a lawyer, perhaps experts of your own, and all the cost that this entails. This will be a big deal to your life, but will be a business expense (i.e. before taxes) for the company suing you.
A while ago I needed to briefly retain a lawyer to navigate a complex contract with my employer, there may be terrible lawyers out there but the person I reached out to was exceedingly thorough in explaining things (and I, as a dev, had lots of rules-lawyery questions to throw at them), quite prompt in their response and charged a modest fee.
Speaking to a lawyer will absolutely cost you more than a coffee, but it's not that pricey in the scheme of things compared to getting in legal hot water.
Without a writ, you have little idea what the substance of their legal claim is; there's no purpose in hiring an attorney, because there's nothing for him to work on. So you are saying: "I don't fold to hollow threats and bullying. If you have a proper legal claim, make a proper legal claim."
If you then get a writ, show it to a lawyer.
If you have no substantial assets, it might be worth pointing that out (once the writ arrives). Nobody wants to sue a man of straw.
I do agree with those who say get a lawyer to send your response. However you should still do the research yourself - to the best of your ability. You can save yourself some expensive lawyer time by knowing the basics and having a potential draft (be careful: make it clear that you do not have any emotional ties to it so the lawyer is free to tear it up) of your response.
the comment you replied to was saying that there is no nation-wide law protecting victims of unnecessary or unjust lawsuits, and there isn't. you simply cannot count on getting your costs paid for if you win in any case.
It's easy to stand on the sidelines and criticize this person for not being a martyr to the cause of our terrible legal system - but, while such a lawsuit would never throw you out of your home, it could very quickly drain your personal savings which, if you have a family that's reliant on that savings for future education, could be devastating.
It is 100% reasonable and a good idea to reach out to the EFF if you're being cyber-bullied by a corp with an axe to grind, but standing on your own in this sort of a scenario is certainly going to inflict a fair bit of pain on the aggressor - but it's likely going to inflict a whole lot more pain on you. Lawsuits like this can be tied up in appeals essentially until we die of heat death given our legal system unless you get extremely likely.
Additionally I feel like you're making the assumption that the work a lawyer does is essentially busy work - discovery is an insanely expensive process to comply with and messing something up during discovery and accidentally deleting a key piece of evidence won't get you a "Well, you're just a rando - we'll let it slide" from the judge.
Lastly - if the trial actually did end up going to court, it's extremely likely you're going to lose without the assistance of a legal professional, US law is insanely complicated and I can almost guarantee that your current employer is breaking some law on a technicality currently, I have no idea what it is - but without legal council neither will you.
what is the maximum damages that a judge would award if replit won this case? $1k? Maybe?
I mean, it's not like Anthony Levandowski put millions of self-driving cars in the streets and took business away from Waymo's self-driving cars. Just by copying Google's intellectual property, not even publishing it for the whole world to see, he committed an offence that cost 18 months in prison and more than 100 million dollars in fines.
Of course, this lawsuit may not have gotten that far, as it seems quite baseless. But it would have taken years of mental turmoil and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees for that to be established. And that is if the threat of the unfavourable outcome did not cause another tragedy like Aaron Swartz's.
Only issue? The Nintendo Switch can't play copies of a game unless you painstakingly modify it.
So every person who visited his site had already decided not to purchase games and exploited gaps in Nintendo's DRM on their personal devices, yet our justice saw fit to permanently ruin him with the incredibly nonsensical argument Nintendo presented.
Our justice system is broken in more ways than are apparent.
If there was trade secret - then there's no minimum, it's all however much a lawyer can convince the judge that the company is loosing.
Another good aspect of Texas bankruptcy code for farmers and ranchers is the specific delineations of property that are allowed to be kept during bankruptcy: 2 horses, mules or donkeys and a saddle, blanket and bridle for each, 12 head of cattle, 60 head of other types of livestock, 12 fowl and pets. If you’re a farmer or rancher considering bankruptcy, Chapter 12 could be a better option—a bankruptcy allowed specifically for the debts of a family farmer or fisherman.
[1] https://www.chancemcgheelaw.com/sanantoniobankruptcyblog/tex...
No. What happens if you lose is you pay up to $150,000, plus costs and attorney fees, plus possible criminal penalties. (Here in the US, anyway.)
I guess the main point I’m trying to say that one doesn’t have to fold the second someone threatens you with legal action, even if you don’t have an attorney. A porcupine doesn’t automatically shed all its quills and throw themselves in a mountain lion’s mouth as soon as the mountain lion eyeballs it with a hungry look. You can f*!with people who f* with you. They may just go away when they realize you’re not going to make it easy for them.
The kid who posted this website could get a notarized affidavit saying he didn’t steal any IP, here’s how he got all the stuff, provide links to all the publicly available information, that he simply state that he built a hacky weekend project I good faith, and that no matter how much they pursued him or time they wasted on him, it wouldn’t change the facts of the case. The more time the attorneys spend going after him, the more they’re just gonna waste their own time and look super dumb. Say they are free to pursue whatever legal action they want, just like you’re free to stand up to a frivolous, insecure bully with too much money and free time. Take all the fun out of it for them, don’t roll over and take it because you’re afraid of being potentially bankrupted.
Sure. He could. It would mean absolutely nothing, but he could.
> Say they are free to pursue whatever legal action they want, just like you’re free to stand up to a frivolous, insecure bully with too much money and free time.
Great. Are you going to pay for it? (And pay for it when he loses since it isn't even slightly frivolous?)
You are really underestimating how petty a lot of people are. I was sued for way less than this and the company suing me stood to gain nothing. Companies often have lawyers on retainer for this reason.
You also underestimate the massive stress a lawsuit entails.
The replit case is especially interesting since it could be a lot more personal (because the dev behind it previously worked for them and people hold grudges) and also because it might actually be a lot more valid then a lot of other frivolous C&Ds we see (since they were a former employee and it would be impossible to claim they were unaware of how replit worked at a very basic level). I think this lawsuit is a lot riskier than most and replit certainly does have a leg to stand on in open court.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...
(I originally didn't want to mention the name of the company since you always get very aggressive comments when you post about this company on HN)
> always get very aggressive comments when you post about this company on HN
I wouldn't be surprised, I suppose some/many people here work there, or have such c*rs
this depends on where the case is brought really. and if they can get any money from you there. Which is often partially effected by where you live.
Why? If you are 100% legally in the right then why wouldn't an entity with sufficient resources whose agenda is in line with that of yours support you? They will get all the expenses compensated after you+they win, won't they?
Also, can only field X amount of cases per period, unless they want to be dealing with burnout etc
Anecdotally, there were a lot of lawsuits claiming fraud & etc in the recent US president elections and I haven't heard of a single case where they had to pay for losing them.
[1]: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/attorney-fees-does-l... [2]: https://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/anti-slapp
In that case, I wouldn't even bother to try to defend myself, if he doesn't have any proof that something is copied as it seems, no way he will win. Worse case scenario and you are guilty, fine, you will have to take down your project? You will have to pay a compensation? How much can this be quantified? 100$? 1000$? I don't think more than that. And if you refuse to pay? They have to do another trial just to have your money. In the end, they will end up spending a lot of money and maybe in 10 years they hope to get something back (most probably nothing).
> Default judgment is a binding judgment in favor of either party based on some failure to take action by the other party. Most often, it is a judgment in favor of a plaintiff when the defendant has not responded to a summons or has failed to appear before a court of law. The failure to take action is the default. The default judgment is the relief requested in the party's original petition.
Linkletter has a gofundme here: https://ca.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio
I've donated, and would recommend others do the same.
It doesn't matter what the value proposition was, this will be a stain on his name "the guy who open sources the stuff he likes in our design/projects"
Most lawyers don't care since they are getting paid anyway. And something like a website that could be easily transferred into another jurisdiction or throw-away company? Good luck. This is not real estate where you are a sitting duck.
The OP doesn't have an operating business, he can decide to put it on hiatus, as a resulting of bullying or for any other reason.
Very immature behavior on Amjad's part. I'm considering pulling our corporations subscription and moving to Stackblitz now....
Until, curiously enough, today...
My guess is, his "top lawyers" and other advisors gave him instructions which amounted to - in layman's terms - "Dude, STFU."
Edit: disregard, he did show up and start commenting here.
https://twitter.com/pnegahdar/status/1402018604233732098
And tweeted this:
Radon interned at repl.it and asked a lot of questions. To be clear, asking a lot of questions is a good thing for career development in that it results in learning a ton, and typically something you definitely want your full-time employees to do, but not necessarily what you're expecting from an internship/temp worker arrangement.
Amjad apparently had some awareness of Radon being a particularly curious intern. Again, nothing wrong with that!
Radon then published an open-source hobby project which seemed to build on many of the teachings from repl.it. Based on what we can see of the discussion, it's likely that Radon wouldn't have had the exposure to the problem domain in order to build the solution he did, as fast as he did, had he not spent time at repl.it and asked a lot of questions.
Radon then showed this to Amjad, and as all of the above dawned on Amjad, he reacted incredibly poorly. The analogy he's using in his tweets ("someone goes into your house and steals from you, even if it's not material") suggests he's likening it to inviting a friend over to a dinner party at your mansion, having the guest ask a bunch of questions about the design, excuse themselves to use the restroom, and poke around in all the closets along the way. Next week they invite you over to the 1-bedroom flat that they regularly livestream from, and you see they've applied lessons they learned while asking questions and wandering around your place, to their interior design.
You don't feel robbed, but you may certainly feel a bit slighted. If you're a private person you might be a bit miffed about how your years of hard work has been distilled into something more spartan and put on display for others to copy.
Even if I think Amjad's response was quite over the top, I do think it's fair to be a bit surprised to learn that your guest spent a significant portion of their visit poking around in your closets instead of focusing on the dinner company. In the context of an internship, it comes across as mildly jarring to point out that you were actually just after interior design lessons rather than enjoying dinner for the sake of dinner.
I'm not proposing this is in reality close to what happened; Radon seems highly motivated and prolific, and was probably an amazing intern. I also don't think he did anything legally in the wrong, even if unconventional and potentially offensive.
Amjad's reaction was totally inappropriate, but based on his tweets there is at least some reason to the rhyme.
What repl.it is doing that is unique is the amount of investment into all of the "extra" stuff around it.
The "number of languages" thing isn't secret sauce either...clearly once you have the base repl working, iterating more languages is pretty straightforward.
(And honestly - most HNers would just take the opportunity to bash him if he showed his face, so for his mental health as well I am happy he's keeping to the shadows)
Not that that's stopped Amjad from commenting anyway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27428400.
If you're unable to pay for it, you will not receive justice.
I am aware that this is not the 1950's superman definition of justice. It is the "welcome to America" version of justice, that you often can't even get if you can pay for it, depending on who you are.
So, you pick that fight. I've got a family and a life I need to protect; I'll stand on the sidelines and watch, thank you very much.
It’s not any definition of justice, its simply the rule of the powerful over the weak.
Be that as it may, it likewise does no one any good to pretend it has any connection to justice.
> Be that as it may, it likewise does no one any good to pretend it has any connection to justice.
...because someone on HN is going to be confused by the witty criticism of justice, and experience actual moral or intellectual confusion? Does this not strike you as linguistic pedantry?
But... other than those allowances... Yea, money is pretty important in the US justice system.
People that buy into that ideal fund those organisations so they can provide legal support to enact those principles.
The existence of those organisations (or pro bono work) is not a counterpoint to the premise that the US justice system is predicated upon money (and the implied corrolary that the level of justice you receive is proportional to the amount you pay for it).
(having said that, I don't necessarily agree with the flippant comment that you are replying to, but still).
Not really. The things this country has done since its inception are deplorable, and yet we have people in this country that want to prevent people from learning more accurate history to keep fake, nationalist "patriotism" at an all time high. They want the system to be cruel and hurtful. What is there in America to even be proud of nowadays?
Lawyers may not like losing cases, but they like billable hours even more. So as long as their client is paying, they will follow their wishes as best they can.
Even "meaningless actions" such as "cease and desist" letters or "demand" letters probably need consultation with a lawyer for a proper response. This "admit no wrong" advice can actually be tricky. What may seem like an innocent or innocuous comment could make your situation worse.
By the time you have an actual civil action against you, you may have missed the opportunity to end the matter without getting to this point.
By this point, you have already lost (hundreds or thousands of dollars of lawyer fees and possibly countless sleepless nights).
"Stop letting people be bullies" is unfortunately hard unless you are sure that you can afford the cost.
You're only boned if it actually goes to court - and even in that case you're still free to settle until the judge announces a verdict.
Any settlement that doesn't consist of "the company withdraws their claims *and covers your lawyer costs" means you lost.
Not saying you're going to go bankrupt, just that you lost (financially) compared to just giving up a toy project and letting the bully win.
There's no way you can know what this person's legal exposure might be without seeing their employment contract. They may well be completely in the right and this CEO is all bluster, but it's unequivocally bad advice to suggest that there's nothing to be concerned about based on the information you have.
Even beyond that, I've (unfortunately) known companies that were entirely willing to dump money into lawsuits they knew they had no hope of winning just to set the precedent that you should not cross them or they'll bury you in legal expenses.
In the end your advice may be exactly right, but it's definitely not reasonable to make these kinds of blanket assumptions.
I'm speaking from a UK perspective, so perhaps in the US it's different. While ignoring lawyers is stupid, waiting until they actually get in touch and looking at the merits of their case is not stupid, as the parent comment says. Then if they seem minded to pursue it anyway then fine, back down. But companies don't want to spend loads of money suing someone with no money either. The people who really lose are the people who entirely ignore the lawyers or are determined to take a case to court when they don't have the money for it out of some misplaced sense of righteousness.
The judge will tell you all to go away and try to find an agreement. This agreement will either be Replit leaving you alone or Replit buying you out.
IANAL, but I was in a similar situation and I cannot see any circumstance where you get raked over the coals.
Sure you would.
Specially in the US, where justice is mostly a rich man's game.
Same in Pakistan.
Obviously the right thing to do is to stand up to this bullshit. I have massive respect for anyone with the balls to do that. Everyone else is better off doing things as anonymously as possible. Can't sue you if nobody knows who you are.
Edit: nvm it's already happening: https://github.com/umesh-timalsina/riju
Well, the US News coverage and TV made being really afraid of lawyers the norm. Especially when you are poor. In the countries in the EU where I lived, I do not even have to open the threat email, but if I lived in the US, I would be very afraid. No idea if that is true or not but the system seems geared for bullying the little guy over there.
P.S. I looked at using them but 'loved' totally transparent demo.
But this situation is terrible. I've seen multiple YC CEOs bring out the fancy lawyers that they got connected to through the incubator. In some cases, these were multi-million dollar arguments that really arose because the YC CEO screwed up (in very very basic ways!) and then the they got butthurt when things didn't go their way. And YC is connected with they very kinds of lawyers who are happy to make money off of bullying their way through "deals."
Why does YC keep funding CEOs who get their egos bruised so easily? If you're a CEO and you're using your legal leverage irresponsibly, just imagine what the company books must look like.
Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
Well this can be developed into a great replit competitor
Or at least it would save up a lot of boostrapping cost. Otherwise this whole thing indeed makes no sense.
I think the idea is that it's trivial to take what you've described and add "a small amount of work that an early-career engineer (even if talented) describes as easy".
I don’t get what you’re saying here. It’s not a breach of trust to speak publicly about someone threatening legal action against you.
Trust is destroyed as soon as your first reaction to something is to summon lawyers.
I actually somewhat agreed until I read "I will be engaging our lawyers on Monday if it is still up by then."
That said, all the possible IP in something like this is in security, reliability, scalability and good UX.
Severely doubt the OP spent much time on that.
The CEO is probably just having trouble dealing with stress and is acting out. It happens.
I agree it's not uncommon for first-time founders/CEOs to see phantom ghosts and lash out; however, we should be careful to not normalize that kind of behavior. Founders often hold mentorship or supervisory positions over their current and ex-employees, so it's harmful when they react with aggression and manipulation.
At small companies, that betrayal of trust cuts deeper than it does in more common manager-employee relationships, IMO.
That doesn't give them a free pass to lash out at people.
Now, the only reason to make the conversation public is to apply public pressure to make something happen.
It's also notable that Amjad used to work at CodeAcademy on up-and-going interactive coding experiences. Now he has his own company building up-and-going interactive coding experiences. What did Amjad learn while he was at CodeAcademy, being privy to internal business operations?
Rather than downvoting your comment I opted to reply to it since it may provide a bit more information for you to base your judgement on about "things being muddier".
As for your last comment about their abilities - forgive me but that sounds incredibly unfair and unwarranted and verges on being a personal attack.
But then I believe this is legal (depending on your jurisdiction).
From reading the emails, it looks like the Replit CEO "trusted" that the OP was cowed into submission.
If that was the case almost everyone with a GitHub project could be sued to infinity, because almost everyone learns tons of things every day while working.
https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in...
Specifically California Business and Professions Code Section 16600,
“every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.”
In addition such issues must by law be decided in California courts and if they forced the issue into court and lost they would be liable for the cost of his defense.
Even outside of California there are limits to what you can enforce. Judges aren't liable to find that an infinite duration noncompete reasonable.
Another example in Washington State its now impossible to obtain noncompetes for anyone paid less than a rate of 100k per annum as an employee or 250k per annum as a contractor and they are limited to 18 months duration.
If you improperly assert a noncompete you are liable for 5000 or actual damages whichever is greater.
They are probably not asserting a noncompete because it is functionally impossible for them to do so. They would have to assert that he was making use of trade secrets or that in some nebulous way his design belonged to them. eg trade dress
https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/intellectual-property/...
The answer is you need a lawsuit to decide but probably not.
Still didn't stop everyone I've ever worked for from making me sign them, enforceable or not. I guess it's different elsewhere.
(That also says nothing about whether such a contract has or has not been signed by the relevant parties.)
I don't think Repl.it has a leg to stand on they just have a pile of money and the presumption of being willing and able to hire a shark in a suit to ruin someone's life with a baseless suit filed for the sake of harassment.
If you hire an intern to work on your code base you own merely own the work that person creates for the duration of their internship. Your piddling money doesn't buy you the general knowledge of how such a solution works any more than an auto shop acquires by dint of buying a few hours of labor owns the mechanics understanding of how a transmission works.
I would think that a few chunks of very similar code, and a well-paid expert testifying, plus the fact that he had knowledge of Replit's code from his employment, would go a long way towards a tough time in court for both parties. (Or, at the very least, that they both need to talk to lawyers before/when they start throwing around legal threats...)
Amjad, replit's CEO, offered to hire OP, later accused them of copying their "internal designs", then threatened them with lawyers replit's millions can buy, eventually to stonewall and stop replying to their emails. What kind of trust is that?
> Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
That's a valid perspective, alright. One that's minority I sincerely hope.
Which means that the legal threats levelled against OP are presumably coming from a place of emotion and personal resentment, and I'm very much not prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt to replit under those circumstances.
Different Principals have different ways of evaluating threats, and reacting to them. At first glance, this seems like an awful mistake, on the part of the Replit people (Can you say "own goal"? I knew you could!).
Maybe there's more to the tale than appears here, but it does seem fairly straightforward; assuming that the emails shared tell the whole story.
I hope that everyone finds a way past this, and comes out OK.
One thing that I will say, is that the OP seems to be pretty sharp. He's young, and maybe he reacted more quickly and naively than a cynical old bastard like Yours Truly would, but he has done a pretty cool job on his project. It might not be "ship-ready," but it sounds like a great demonstration of his capabilities.
Also, as Elon Musk shows, CEOs can cause tremendous damage, if they go off-script. Being a CEO of a public/funded company is a fairly awesome Responsibility. It needs to be taken seriously.
I'd say that this very thread shows the damage that can be done to the company. Having this pinned at #1 on HN for all this time is devastating. It's actually kind of horrifying. Like watching a slow-motion train wreck. A lot of Replit employees and VCs are going to take it in the shorts from this. He's probably got some 'splainin' to do...
I can't remember the company, but there's a famous object lesson of a UK CEO that destroyed his life's work and corporation, by mentioning an upcoming product too early in a BBC interview.
We actually had one of those things, at the company I worked for. It was a monster, and had this tiny little screen, and a couple of 8" drives.
The founders seemed to get upset, I still don't really know why, presumably because of the short tenure. They then proceeded to not pay me my last month's wages while attempting to feed me various excuses or just failing to reply to messages.
I eventually got the case in front of a judge (self represented) and discovered that despite them telling me about their lawyers they were also representing the case themselves without any idea about the legal situation. The judge basically laughed them out of court, starting off by pointing out that even if all of their statements were correct they still had no legal basis for not paying the wages. The judge then checked their accusations (that I had lied to them during the hiring process) and found they were not correct.
Despite them having no legal basis the whole process was pretty stressful since until the court case I had been assuming they had some reason to not just settle. (I was mostly worried the recruiter had done something genuinely dodgy during the hiring process.)
I'm still surprised that those people can run a company for more than 5 years.
The problem with applying the "rational actor" test here, or anywhere really, is that to a first approximation people are not rational actors.
So when a CEO makes legal threats against some random dev's side project, seemingly out of a sense of entitlement to the very idea of a polyglot code sandbox, I'm going to be pretty harsh.
What exactly are you skeptical about? It's read to me like you were disbelieving the story because you didn't believe the CEO would act that way. To the contrary, it's entirely plausible (regardless of truth).
We can completely agree that people ought to be behaving more rationally, but empirically in enough cases, they don't.
Based on the commit log in the article, he added support for running code in 79 programming languages in 4 days. I'd say he's probably pretty talented.
He willingly traded some percentage chance at a competitor using an open source project to steal some percentage of his business for this PR nightmare. Personally I think this effort shows the bar for such a project is pretty low so I don't think shutting it down was a good trade off. I think it shows immaturity, bad will, bad faith and honestly its more of a case study in whom not to work for. Most people they would want to hire are liable to have multiple options. They can ill afford to be an undesirable choice.
Personally, I think the Replit CEO could have explained what the specific issues were before threatening to sue. Since there was no explanation on the CEO's part, I think it's perfectly warranted for the author to make this public.
Thanks guys for the comments. Definitely helps to view this matter from more angles, and it's clearer now. This is certainly a case study of who not to work for. (I didn't know so much about Replit and its CEO prior and totally missed the totalitarian vibe he is giving)
Curious to see how much the Replit community & ecosystem would be affected this event.
This is now on the first page of HN Search https://hn.algolia.com/
Both seem to think they're Xerox PARC - or the most ambitious software companies on earth, both products seem pretty underwhelming.
Just seems wildly disproportionate to what they're doing. At least Steve Jobs was actually building stuff that was revolutionary. Elon Musk is building reusable rockets and pulling EVs from the future to modern day. Roam is making another centralized document editor?
In terms of software ambition neither of them come close to Urbit in what they're trying to accomplish, and Galen is not an ass about it.
Solving this would be helpful for teaching and I think it's not trivial to do well. I think there's an argument that being good at troubleshooting and debugging is 90% of programming so the shitty dev environment setup currently is a bit of a filter, but I generally think that's a bad status quo rationalization.
All this is to say - I think there's a market and the product is likely valuable, but I also don't think it's reusable rockets or rebuilding the internet or the 'most ambitious software company in history'. This kind of framing turns me off and when paired with stuff like this post leads me to avoid the company entirely.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Building a better UX isn't done 'simply' - and the result is often worth billions.
I would consider an approachable wrapper over a difficult tool to be innovative. Programming languages are essentially just UX wrappers over assembly. Is garbage collection an innovation, or a UX improvement? What about type systems? None of them make things possible that weren't possible before, they just make it easier.
Information for the sake of information is interesting, but where is it's value if it can't be applied to anything?
I'm sure there are a lot of incredibly clever startup founders out there but I get the impression that more than not you attract founders that are more interested in the status rather than the innovation aspect. I said status not money as a lot of the time these folks don't really care about money as long as they can add a "Founder of X, an YC funded company" on their profile and share their next viral tweet, with lots of adjectives, lots of buzzwords and no depth. Startup funding became a game of convincing others that you as a person deserve the funding, not the company itself.
Yeah, not SpaceX or Neuralink or Pfizer. A company that runs docker images is the most innovative company.
I'd say the most innovative company in the world is probably Alphabet or Samsung.
Another really big thing is that Samsung funds a lot of basic research also at the university level, which AFAIK none of the big tech companies do.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20140702013410/http://runnable.co...
https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-kickst...
VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn't be surprising when people try very hard to protect that investment to help them get a better return.
Yeah, but if the investment is threatened by a weekend project built in a few days, it means that a serious competitor could destroy it in a couple weeks.
The thought that came to mind about this was a baker stepping on ants outside his store because nobody was coming into the store. If nobody wants to come into the store because of ants crawling in front, your store has larger issues.
If someone is invested and stands to loose money, it does not gice them a free pass to act immorally.
Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of people to work on some product, you teach them "secrets of the trade", send them to conferences, let them participate in making decisions, giving them extraordinary insight in the area of work you are active on... and as soon as they leave your company, they use all that knowledge to try to create something with that on their own (I can understand it, once you konw stuff and enjoy it, you want to keep working on it even in your own time), just for fun... basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.
This is incredibly unprofessional. If he had at least come up with something original based on that knowledge , I would be totally on his side, but his stuff, while it may not be an exact copy of repl.it, is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do that.
Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years to get an idea out to the world and make it work for others as good as they can... if you want to use your knowledge, just contribute back to the project if it's open-source (your contribution will be a lot more useful, very likely, to other people than your poor, basic little project)! If you actually want to compete, which the author claims was not at all his goal (yeah, right, until someone shows even a trace of interest in paying something for it), then by all means go ahead and act reckless, but you'll need to come up with some pretty major advantage to have any chance, and will be taking pretty huge risks with lawsuits, but that's business as usual in the corporate world.
Too bad, that's business and how a functioning free market works. If it's that important to Replit, then they should patent it. If they can't get a patent then, again, too bad.
Not sure what they'll do if another company decides to reinvent it.. but /shrug
(to be clear, not defending them at all)
I'm not defending how the CEO behaved here - it looks very unprofessional at best - but the patent system is not the only or the best mechanism to enforce intellectual property rights.
> If someone with an actual commercial enterprise were to offend Replit, I shudder to think what treatment they might receive.
Patents would cover both the employee and outside competitor situations.
> it is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do that.
Ideas aren't worth the paper they're written on, and a startup founder should know that better than anyone else. Hell, wasn't Fairchild "the same idea" as Shockley Semi?
I have a lot of respect for what repl.it is and their vision, and the intern did not come close to copying it. But I did lose a bit of respect for the current leadership if this is how they respond to toy reimplementations of certain features.
With this reasoning anyone at Amazon cannot join another ecommerce, or anyone at Microsoft OS cannot join Apple, or anyone in iPhone team cannot join Android.
If you are worried that your product is at the mercy of people not talking about it, or experimenting with the knowledge in future, then thats the least of your worries. The product, the team and the company is in a deep mess.
Because Replit didn't originate the idea of "web site you can execute code on". There's no idea to be stolen here, or if there was stealing, it's not from Replit.
There was respect shown.
Replit is not that innovative or the pioneer of this idea - many have done this so many times before
Wit this silly logic, nobody can ever work for a compeitor.
Was Zoom's CEO unprofessional for starting Zoom after working so long in WebEx? How about Jet.com founder after working at Amazon?
For Zoom, that was to market the product to random people for free or close to free because the cost to provide it had fallen enough to make it worth while.. WebEx was unwilling or unable to do so. I'm sure it was suggested many times. Probably even by the soon to be CEO of Zoom before he left to do it himself.
Sometimes the original company is worried about cannibalizing their sales, or shifting focus from their current customers, or it's just plain a case of them moving far too slowly to take advantage of the market. These are all cases where someone leaving and starting a new company to serve this demand is a good thing for consumers, regardless of whether it's good for the original company. Companies that can't respond to market needs are inefficient, and in a well functioning market suffer for that.
In a poorly functioning market, such as one with overly onerous regulatory hurdles, or litigation preventing competition, or customer lock-in, customers are given fewer choices and competition is constrained. People taking their expertise and making new companies to serve different segments of that market is a feature, not a bug or problem. It's how the market works. If repl.it is worried about a hobby project that can't scale and doesn't seem to be attempting to compete in the market, how much value is it actually providing? Threatening litigation says a lot more about their product than the competitor, IMO, and what it says is not flattering.
Two things, first: You write like the company did the teaching, sending to conferences, allowing to participate ... out of the goodness of their heart. Obviously they did this because they saw a value in this, in fact they even pay their employees money to do these things.
Moreover, what do you think happens when people leave companies, they never use the knowledge they acquired? Do the companies continue to own that knowledge? Moreover, it even happens all the time employee leave and even found direct competitors to their previous employees. Just look at the founding history of Intel for a famous example. Also by the same measures we could accuse the repl.it CEO of stealing ideas from codeacademy and facebook where he worked previously, I mean he build an interactive website.
Repl.it itself is completely unoriginal... there's been websites doing this stuff for decades now. Of course, the CEO has to live in denial of this, and is easily threatened/offended when confronted by this reality.
Would this hold up in case of a lawsuit? I mean, can Replit's CEO accuse the guy of copying some of their work if there's evidence of prior art that predates both projects?
e.g. if they had a patent on something and were accusing infringement you'd countersue to say the patent's invalid (which I think in a nicely engineering appealing way is conceptually separate from the question of whether or not an awarded patent has been infringed upon).
Trademarks, being a de facto recognisably you mark, are not if they are in widespread use - which is why you get a lot of big guys suing tiny little guys and tabloids pick it up outraged they'd pick a fight so below their weight - but at some point enough little guys diluting your brand is going to mean it's no longer your brand, your trademark, and then it's too late to fight it.
(IANAL.) I assume this isn't about a non-compete clause otherwise he would've just said that instead of this vaguer message. (And it was two years ago OP worked there anyway.) So unless there's a patent supposedly infringed on, or closed source code copied out, I don't know what the complaint could even be in the first place? Just reads like an empty threat to me. That 'repl.it superiority' commit message is unfortunate though.
Vague general ideas like "a car" or "140 character limit" are not property, and so cannot be stolen.
Acting this way is superbly entitled.
Replit makes a webapp you can use to run code online in different programming languages. This is nothing new (just Google “run python online” for proof), so Replit’s value proposition is extra features like sharing your work, installing third-party packages, and hosting webapps.
...
Now, none of the ideas I used in my open-source project were “internal design decisions”: they’ve all been published publicly on Replit’s blog (I knew this because I’d been asked to write some of those blog posts during my internship). And my project also wasn’t any more of a Replit clone than any of the other websites on the first few pages of Google results for “run python online”, most of which look exactly the same.
You may disagree with these claims, but the general / hypothetical stance of your post does not give me any reason to think OP is blowing smoke up our collective asses.
For that matter, the CEO of Replit could be more specific about what OP's 'crime' is, though I suspect the worst of it is that OP's actions revealed how threadbare the Emperor's clothes are.
You can't end the employment agreement and still expect others to act like they work for you. Every ex-employee is a business person on the same level as you. If they see an opportunity and beat you, you were a fool for letting them go.
Radon outlined why this isn't true. [1]
> basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.
It appears as if you're advocating that Radon should've treated the open-source code as if it was closed? [1]
> This is incredibly unprofessional
In what world is it unprofessional to work on a personal side project that has ZERO commercial interests and is using 100% public open-source code? This is actually one of the most professional online disagreements I've ever seen..
> Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years
hUHH ???
My wish: Replit should sue intern, intern should get free attorney from EFF, case should be dismissed as "WTF" in court. Future CEOs will know that "an intern would need three days to technically replicate" is not a differentiator. Also, hope is not a strategy. VCs would learn that hearing BS from CEO is not "due diligence".
Intern would eventually be showered in money for speaking to further CEOs about that one mistake they should never do.
The world would move on and be a better place for everyone, except unprepared CEOs.
I think it's really easy for tech teams to do things in a sub-optimal way and then get all caught up in fixing problems of their own making and start to think they're doing really great technical work and that it is a competitive advantage for the company. More companies need to face the fact that their software can be easily replicated and that the value lies elsewhere, such as brand, reputation, reliability, good customer service, etc -- other things that an intern can't replicate in a weekend.
Facebook playbook for market rise is legendary. The limited rollout, the college based communities based on your edu email created this campus privacy and campus group. Starting off with the ivy league schools and slowly working into other schools created this demand as people talked. By the time facebook opened to the general public they had such a buzz. When they rolled out to this group they included one killer feature.. they allowed you to give your hotmail email/password and they would get a list of your contacts from your email and invite them to facebook. That brought in your aunt, brother, old friends to facebook. That created a network effect. Throw in the whatapps story and instagram story and an election/congressional hearings and you have facebook today.
The code part seems so minor. Retracing their steps is impossible. The path to facebook killer is a huge challenge to think that could only be done in a weekend is crazy.
Then these lucky, spoiled-rotten assholes think they're entitled to sue anyone who tries to compete with them. Everyone knows this is not a free market. Just a bunch of artificially selected spoiled brats with rich daddies/friends enriching themselves by destroying society.
I know of other cases where well funded CEOs have tried bullying away someone who recently worked for them from starting a company in a related space. Glad that they weren't able to shut it down, and the new founder has raised a nice round. I'd love to see Radon succeed with his project.
IANAL but I don't think you can patent "path depencence". It is sunk cost
"You don't need to remind you the essence of competition is
always been quite simple, any kid working in a garage
anywhere in the world with a good idea can put us out
of business".
Milo: It would be open source, we offer it free to
everybody, just charge for tech support.
Gary: Wow, free.
It's a cut-throat business we're in Milo.
It's just a matter of time before someone borrows your
technology, improves it and makes a billion dollars on it.
What would you do with a billion dollars Milo?
...
The question really is,
How many of the people you share discoveries with
will be altruistic? and how many will make fortunes
of your generosity?
As OP says any value add is about accounts and sharing and whatever, the code-running in a browser functionality is two a penny.
I even go so far to say that the CEO doesn't want his secret to out that he is not that great programmer after all. He just took someone else's idea and build a company around it.
Just don’t do that, it’s in poor taste.
I would be more interested in running all of these languages in wasm and the execution state can be live migrated between the server and the client, that would be something that could surpass other online repls.
https://qvault.io/python/running-python-in-the-browser-with-...
Repl.it has no standing to code written by Radon.
Thinks like that have been done even with plain JS and the results are very cool, see e.g. SqueakJS, a Squeak/Smalltalk VM implemented directly in JS.
Link?
Edit: NVM, found it: https://github.com/umesh-timalsina/riju
As far as Lively Kernel goes, is there a list of languages it supports? All I got from your links is that it is a JavaScript-based web development environment, seems to have a lot of Smalltalk related stuff, and that it includes something called lively.ide, which provides "Tool support for programming and debugging JavaScript, HTML, CSS, shell" and "Other languages can be plucked in as needed (see cloxp and LivelyR)."
No, and I wasn't suggesting that. Though Lively was a project at YC Research in 2016/2017 and replit is a YC 18 company I think. So they might have heard about it but I do not remember giving any demos to folks involved with it.
And even if, we actually invited folks to copy the ideas. The Lively project was not a product but trying to carry forward a set of ideas rooted in Smalltalk. Every copy (even if its not a good one) is cool to see. It has the change to make the language and tooling eco system better, programming easier and more immediate, and might invite more people to get started building software and having fun with computers.
> is there a list of languages it supports
No not really. We build out a few to have more polish (as you mentioned LivelyR and cloxp, support for shell programming and node.js that is part of Lively itself). But there isn't really much to it: here is e.g. a quick'n dirty Haskell "subserver" that can run as part of Lively and allows to load a Haskell runtime, load Haskell files and evaluate expressions [1] (this is anno 2013, please don't judge too hard about the code ;). Some of these are floating around. We then customized the ACE editor [2] a bit for providing some fundamental editing experience (it has syntax highlighting for a large number of languages builtin). That's it, for a simple integration, not much is needed really.
There is also the amazing Ohm project [3], a toolkit for writing PEG parser and interpreters which is standalone but got its integration into Lively as well. It allows to quickly experiment with new language ideas or implement grammars/interpreters for existing languages.
We are inching closer towards a more "public" release, and hope to be there in the next few weeks
Not sure if I can help but happy to get in touch. Feel free to shoot me an email or such, contact links in my profile.
You're right about Replit going to YC after Lively, but Replit actually started much earlier (2009ish)
> originally created by Dan Ingalls at Sun Microsystems
[1] https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel/tree/master/cor...
That said, my gut feeling as an outsider is that they feel genuinely burnt by a former employee making something similar to their product. Not just cynically trying to smash the competition. Not that that justifies anything—everyone thinks they're the good guy (well, almost everyone).
Agreed, I think it's totally fair for the CEO to be a little peeved by the project, and the complaint is about how horrible his handling of it was. This is exacerbated by how unfailingly polite and professional the ex-intern is in the (presumably) unabridged email thread.
A (different) jobs board where the companies posting the jobs do not have control of the comment discussion would be interesting to see - but would need a monetization strategy that ensures it can survive without turning into pay-to-censor junky platforms like Yelp or Glassdoor.
We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved [1]. That's why the OP has been at #1 all day - normally we downweight indignation posts at least a little, to compensate for the default tendency to massively upvote them, but we haven't touched this thread in any way. I don't think we'd take that so far as to selectively turn off the Who Is Hiring rules, though. It would set a confusing precedent.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Plus one of the most upvoted topics ever, 4k votes is a lot.
Btw, indicates that it's one good that HN otherwise downweights indignation posts.
I also am failing to connect the dots about why Replit would even feel threatened - if you were as helpful of an intern as described, you’d think they would recognize that you had good intentions only when creating Riju - very odd behavior from Replit all around.
Instead they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty.
I could give the legal peacocking a pass. It's a weird flex, a bit too much ego really, but sure, I don't care if your daddy is cooler than my daddy.
Punching down at your intern though, as a CEO? Jeez, talk about poor leadership. I would not work for that man.
The unfortunate truth is that this doesn't matter. Oracle, as one recent example, is still wildly successful - even in the open source space.
This will indeed the case, and I’ll personally won’t be recommending them anymore. If they’re so petty to threaten to sue some intern, they’re not worth doing business with.
With that said, I also think certain employees though have a very slippery mentality of this sort of vibe where they do things that might be sketchy or on the borderline not OK (but JUST on the line), and then rationalize as "but ... reason!". The tone of this whole article is very subtly reminiscent of that... the type of person that when given an inch will take 10 inches (not even a mile, not that severe), and always do it under the guise of many bullet points and being nice, like this article... but the undertones are there that they're really trying to push the boundary.
That's my unsolicited .02
So when he posts a few images of other sites that "look" similar, I don't quite buy the fact that he didn't liberally borrow from the many hours of decisions by Repli. Thats purely a guess though, and I could absolutely be wrong.
I would imagine it would be easy for the author to rationalize it in his head that "well, lots of other sites have a button in the top row I can do it too!" and in effect, ends up copying a lot of Replit features without innovating on them simply because other sites "look similar"
I picture myself as a CEO seeing a previous employee with something that is very clearly using a lot of the decisions we worked out together, and then see a list of 20 bullet points trying to rationalize why it's ok, that would be super irritating to me, but that would be the limit of it. Definitely not worthy of anything more than a polite conversation, that's for sure.
Because that’s what work experience is: showing future employers where not to make mistakes that were previously learned in the course of work. That knowledge (that has a half life) is part of my compensation, arguably the most valuable of my total comp.
As I said in the other reply, my post is at an emotional/personal level (as an owner/creator and also employer), not necessarily a legal or more political one. On that basis i 100% side with the author here.
I was merely saying this situation definitely smells like one where there's more to the story than "big bad replit picking on poor innocent open source guy". Just the tone of his writing seems, and the "one of most difficult interns" gives me gut reaction that he might actually be someone who tries to be pushy while being nice.
You took a single sentence out of an entire article with plenty of other supporting evidence to construct a reality where someone in a similar position as you would have cover.
It's extraordinary.
My current "constructed reality" is that the author built something in a very short time, likely liberally re-using design decisions from his previous employer. And that the CEO, who is a douche, got emotionally upset over this, probably from his perspective/shared history which is something NO ONE ON HN CAN SEE, and there's likely more to the story. Emotionally I can understand why this might upset Replit CEO. One can be frustrated, while still being mature enough to not let it affect action, and certainly not threatening to sue or any of that.
HN is so black and white sometimes it's painful. Just because I can relate emotionally to one person being frustrated, doesn't suddenly mean I fully support all their actions or live in some fantasy land tiny projects should be sued for exaggerated claims
No, it really isn't because that's how business works. This is like getting upset that my plumber might fix my competitors' pipes, too.
I don't know many people who would not be upset about investing many hours into something only to have someone copy it in 24 hour period and repost it with only slight modifications as theirs.
Acting on that, however, is a very different story. If someone is going to act on such emotions they shouldn't be a CEO to begin with probably.
IANAL, but roughly, general knowledge is ok, but specific results aren't. If you were party to user research findings at company A, it's likely against your NDA to tell company B "we should do X" based on the remembered outcome of that research.
Patents can apply, but it’s really only used in novel and unique situations. Even if Replit had a patient on its UI/UX design, if you were able to find evidence of prior art, you could petition to invalidate.
Edit: Ok, just looked it up. Apple lost all claims on copyrighting the Mac UI.
So if you hired an electrician to fix a light bulb and then after they left they told everyone your house sucked. Illegal? no. Unprofessional? yes, slightly. Would you hire them again? no. Would you sue them? that would be ridiculous.
On balance, the CEO is clearly the one more in the wrong here and definitely acting in a dumb way. I would run away from investing in this company with him at the helm. But I would say there is a little bit of bad faith on the other side here too.
The vibe is more about a person being excited for doing something cool with tech and a company where they interned (not worked, interned!) feeling threatened because it crosses into their domain. If "let’s see what else can I maake with this" is an offense, then to hell I'll throw my lightbulbs away.
What do you make of the comment about "hardest intern we've ever worked with."
I understand the CEO is feeling very emotional and is clearly manipulating/exaggerating, but I would imagine he wouldn't say this if it were entirely 100% fabricated.
Do you believe any part of that statement might be true?
I'm disregarding any commentary on actual action taken by the CEO, because as I said I think it's incredibly stupid and immature.
This reply below by @treis is a good explanation of how i feel about the answer to your question.
> Lots of CEOs/Owners will definitely be salty about that. And they're not totally wrong to feel that way. You pay someone a bunch of money only to watch them walk and help your competitor take your market share. It's understandable why that's upsetting. But they should have the maturity to understand that's how the world works and not throw a tantrum.
A few people have mentioned that on this thread, but I don't think it's in sync with the reality of how incredibly hard it is to hire technical talent right now, esp talent that knows your systems well.
It's entirely possible for someone to be the most demanding intern a co has ever had and still be a great hire; hell, it might even be _correlated_. Interns usually haven't figured out workplace norms yet, and combining that with being smart and driven could easily yield good-faith behavior that nevertheless is "demanding" (for example, asking lots of questions about tasks he's given, asking for guidance with parts of the system he's not working on, etc etc). In that case, I would absolutely want to hire that intern, with the understanding that he'd need to get better at the cultural aspects of the job once he joined full-time (as all intern conversions do).
That being said, no question that it was a bizarre and immature thing for the CEO to bring up, and I don't disagree with your characterization of it as "emotionally manipulative".
How many of the CEO class have you interacted with? This is approximately Step 3 in the psychology: "OMG, I have to convince myself and the rest of the world that this person is not only wrong but also bad." He likely spent several minutes rehearsing the comment before writing. (No, really, I've sat there and watched someone repeat similar comments before a meeting, to make sure they believed it enough to be convincing.)
Also, a good way to get employees that aren't testing boundaries is to hire experienced developers rather than interns who are still learning the world.
Overall I don't see what leg repl.it has to stand on here - their product relies on taking numerous free software packages and bundling them into proprietary software, and yet they have the gall to consider button placement some secret sauce?! But it also depends on what OP's employment contract says and when he actually developed this. Altogether, this really just looks like a case of a CEO personally bullying someone else because they can.
Again, it would be different if the CEO threatened a random third party that happened to do a weekend project in the same vertical...
https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in...
I don't know if I were the former intern in question writing a blog post about this I'd be damn sure to specify that there's no NDA or other agreement in place that would legally prevent him from doing this.
This article and the associated 'press' could serve as a text-book case for insecure start-up CXOs.
Nothing harmful, he was just curious about what I liked or didn't like about using replit - tbh I found it pretty cool that they're so close to the user base. Saw the message weeks afterwards, and forgot the reply him.
How 'empty' is Replit as a company if some rando intern is a threat ... and/or how poor is the CEO at deciding how to spend his time if this is how they choose to do it?
To be fair, it is kind of suspect to intern for a company and, at the end of that internship, turn around and create effectively the same thing. And OP’s dismissive tone and propensity to hand wave away things that may be relevant in his blogpost certainly don’t make them seem ideal to employ. But ‘suspect’ only in the sense that (in my personal opinion) it gives credence to the CEO’s comment on the intern being difficult. I still think replit is in the wrong here.
If the product was really unique, maybe. But from the description it seems to be a generic online repl.
I honestly think both are in the wrong here, the CEO should have been a bit more relaxed about the handling of this. As well the intern really should have tried to stay away from projects which directly relate to past company business models.
I also question if this article could be considered defamatory.
Edit: They aren't technically "illegal" in CA, just unenforceable.
https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in... (where I am reading up about this from)
It seems California outlawed non-competes in the sense that if I am a programmer, and I sign a contract which states that I must not be a programmer for the next 5 years after working for X, that is instantly voided.
But this is different, as an intern I copied in essence the core business model (not directly copying the code) and open sourced it, seems like a conflict of interest. Which in this case a non-compete might be able to be held as it's mostly saying I'm a programmer for a company which does X, I can't move to a competitor, or become a competitor (which is somewhat what the intern did).
As someone who is definitely not a lawyer or judge I have no idea where the laws/courts or otherwise stand on this matter in actuality.
> In other words, non-compete agreements are not enforceable in California.
Edit: I don't think it has ever been possible to bar employees from continuing their profession when they leave your employ. Non-competes have ALWAYS been about working for competitors.
Add to that, i don't see any copying of a "business model" here. Seeing as the ex-intern is not even charging for his software and is giving away the source code for free.
The only part of a non compete that is valid to my knowledge is that if an employee leaves for a competitor the company can have them sign an agreement not to poach employees, but even that is very limited. If Bob leaves company A for company B and signs such an agreement, his former coworker Alice is free to say "Hi Bob I'm really excited by company B can I have a referral?" Bob didn't make first contact so he's free to help bring Alice over.
https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca...
This whole saga is pretty sad really.
While replit isn't doing very much in wrapping these languages in a frontend (and something that is clearly straightforward to replicate), they are doing all the work that comes with scaling that to many users on the web (I guess that includes moderation).
They should have just been happy with that.
It takes more than just being able to run all the languages in sandboxes to compete - if you tried this, people would be mining bitcoin and hosting all sorts of awful stuff.
Really strange / insecure attitude.
I find it very bizarre for an intern to do this.
That makes me think that either the tweets are empty virtue signaling; or Amjad is legit worried that an intern open-source project can accidentally outcompete his company!
I'll just leave this here so we can all bask in the insane hypocrisy of this entire episode.
https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca...
Edit: See Amjad's response below – seems Repl.it may have pre-dated this hiring in which case it makes the irony slightly less delicious. Did no learnings from scaling the concept at Codeacademy make it into the current product?
This is one side of the story, we don't have much evidence either direction, and it's not clear there was any "cheating" involved in anyone's past.
HN should do better.
This is a story told with receipts, and receipts carry a weight of their own. Namely, private emails made public. You can see for yourself whether you'll ever see the other side speak through the language of receipts.
So far all he has done is double down on the story told through the emails.
Same thing with people who speak negatively of others to you in private. Odds are they do the same thing, but about you, when speaking with others. If you confide something negative about someone else to them, they'll probably tell that person.
But, we can't just call (even implicitly) Amjad a "cheater".
This isn't rhetoric, this is lived experience. No character assassination required - the character in question has assassinated themselves
However... the irony is still hilarious, and this in no way excuses Amjad's emails
Someone could (and likely is) building a better Repl.it with Nix and Theia. It's fucking flabbergasting to me that everyone in this thread acts like Repl.it is some magical product.
And that's not even accounting for the half-dozen other production-quality VS-Code-in-browser projects.
Sorry, it's just not a unique space. Not surprising at an that an egostistic founder isn't handling it well.
Godbolt is Compiler Explorer, mainly to look at assembly output, but provides editing, benchmarking, and profiling of many languages and compiler versions. I think Godbolt delegates running code to some other site, don't recall who.
Cppreference.com is mainly a C++ and C language and library standards reference library, but provides sample programs and means to run them on various compiler versions.
That uses Coliru, which also provides edit, build, and run.
Been reading it all day to see how it develops, and I've seen at least like 15 low-quality snippy posts by you defending Amjad Masad and his position. A friendly reminder that these kind of posts really lower the quality of discourse here on HN.
It took 2 years of work to get something working and in 2011 we launched on HN (2011 web archive snapshot here https://web.archive.org/web/20111007050930/http://repl.it/ and HN launch here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3056490). It was the first of its kind and it inspired a lot of projects and still does today. It was totally open-source (https://github.com/replit-archive/repl.it) and after the launch it was used as infrastructure by Codecademy (which later employed me) and Udacity and many others to deliver interactive coding in the browser. I was thrilled about that.
Now, a lot of people implicitly assume that in a dispute between for-profit company and an open-source project, the for-profit company must be in the wrong. But there is some line that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product (if you don't believe that, you can stop reading now, because no argument will convince you) and I think to someone who knew Replit's architecture well, this project would clearly be across it. It copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws. That's the hallmark of copying versus merely writing one's own program to solve the same problem.
But a single person is obviously easy to stomp into submission, and in this case it appears to have happened out of pettiness, a suspicion that is really brought home by the quick threats and the weird "work for us...no wait you were a bad co-worker anyway!" bait and switch.
I'm not all too sure about American laws, but in Europe Amjad's argumentation, especially about "design decisions" is very weak. So it seems, that it's not about even having a stronger legal case. Just the ability to throw money at the problem.
So far we only have seen Radon's post and emails screenshots. He seems to be very adamant about not copying any of Replit's IP. But clearly every story has two sides and I think it's very important to hear yours. Hopefully it will come in the form of a blog post or similar.
Genuinely curious and not taking sides with anyone here. I just believe that the OSS community can learn from this.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
This does not make contracts containing such clauses "illegal", but rather unenforceable in court. The student could sign a contract saying "I will not work on a company that competes with Repl.it", and he did, and the company tried to sue him over it with that as the only claim, then the court would quickly grant a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
According to who? You? Hundreds of people in this thread disagree with you. As does the law.
Or would you want to ask them to not release free versions of your paid product?
I've actually seen this exact situation play out twice (except the new products were not free), though I wasn't directly involved. Both times, it only happened because the business owner was, to put it bluntly, a bad person who had no business (heh) running a company, and the result was a mass exodus that birthed a direct competitor.
To answer your thought experiment:
I am looking at this as an employee, as a controlled person. You are looking at it as a founder, owner, or some other type of position that holds power. A controller.
Those with power would view it as immoral. An action like this threatens their power. Those who have enough power to exert a controlling influence, want, above all else, to maintain that power, while also increasing it. Anything that impedes that is unfair, and thus immoral.
Those without power, or with less power, do not see it as immoral, because it is a redistribution of power to those who deserve it just as much, if not more. It is fair. It is just. It is moral.
You see this as immoral because your sympathies lie with those who have power. Might makes right. The states that enforce non-competes have the same view as you, but California does not, and that is one of the many reasons that it remains the global center of technological innovation.
It would seem to me that if I hadn't chosen to train and work with this person, he probably wouldn't have chosen this exact product to release out of all the possibilities in the world.
Let's say that he had an innate inclination for this exact product and would have done it even if he hadn't worked for me. Even then, he wouldn't have been privvy to the various and more detailed information that you are exposed to as an insider.
Going forward, I would be wary of any information I share with this person, given that it could work against me. This would definitely harm our relationship, and I would wish that this person would not do this to me.
If this were a fishing village, and the main thing to do around here was fishing, I would understand. There's not much choice there. But given that there are many different things this person could have worked on besides my exact product, my reaction would be, 'really man?'
It seems like the ex-intern made an honest mistake especially given his age. This isn't exactly the same but Helen Keller messed up and plagiarised when she was young before. People do dumb things, especially when they're young.
Most of the time, this kind of "exodus" happens because the business somehow mismanaged their employees which resulted in them not being happy, leaving the business and opening up a new one.
Even then, if I knew my business would be superior, I wouldn't mind that much. In the case of repl.it I don't see any reason why Riju would pose even the tiniest threat. It's super basic with no obvious plans to be compete with repl.it. Just look at the polish of both products, one is a serious business with funding secured while the other one is a small OS web-app written by somebody in their free time.
However, this is someone that the business helped out. One would hope that the person would reciprocate with positive value for the business, rather than negative value in the form of risk.
If you are interested I wrote another response alluding to the golden rule in a reply close by: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27431326
=
"The actual situation is indefensible, so let's argue a situation of my choosing which is."
E.g. one guy littering isn't so big a deal, but it's clearer that littering is bad if everyone does it because the planet will get filthy fast.
The only beef I had was the non-compete agreement, which I believe is illegal in California.
Rather, making threats over what amounts to it, at someone not equipped to face even such a specious attack, is clearly and indefensibly morally wrong. Shame on Replit, and shame on you for supporting them.
Any company that has $20M in the bank but could possibly be threatened just by a new college grad coding alone does not deserve to exist. Give the money back to the investors and close up shop.
Replit leadership and team should focus on winning by building faster and better, not by artificially blocking innovation.
Depending on the severity of the offense and the circumstances this would make sense, but this was just a small project, not an entire VC-backed service. Would you be willing to provide concrete evidence to show that the intern was actually copying the specifics of your product? As it stands many of us are not convinced that this is the case. What are these "unique, invisible aspects" of Replit that you are referring to which are so integral to merit legal action from you? And do you believe it was justified against a project that was never even intended to be anything more than a hobbyist activity?
Or the hallmark of having experience working in a particular domain, and simply favoring techniques and approaches that are familiar. Is there any particular reason why anybody should believe that any of these "unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture" constitute any kind of genuine "intellectual property" in either a legal OR moral sense??
I mean, if you're arguing that he literally copied copyrighted code, then sure, OK, maybe you have something. But nebulous appeals to "design decisions?" Don't expect many people to have sympathy for that. At some point you're treading into "anybody who ever worked for a company making cars can never work for another car company" or "A guy who makes a new chair owes money to everyone who ever built a chair" territory.
https://github.com/replit/upm is likely one of the blacked-out bits in that email, as Radon says he wrote the README.
I agree with Amjad there. I just don’t think that working with something means you can never use those patterns again. That’s ridiculous. If I couldn’t use any of the patterns that I learned about in previous jobs I would still be programming as if I had 1 year of university experience.
Wow. Amjad basically invited Radon to post about this online.
Obviously, knowledge learned from mistakes or design discussions from one's time at another company is no issue. The intern seemed to have worked on a project very limited in scope to the overall product (package management). It is quite possible the bells and whistles that Replit's CEO is claiming that is copied are taken from design documents made by someone else - which is not at all learnings from working around a particular domain. In my opinion, this might actually be problematic. I don't think Radon was being malicious here, but you might also want to consider that Radon is a fresh graduate and might not have fully considered the implications of where it is acceptable for him to draw designs from.
A reference/relationship like that is worth a lot more than a project that is a little sketchy. No matter what happens, I think the intern has taken a net loss from this whole fiasco.
On the other hand, What has Amjad lost today in terms of personal reputation?
Can’t say I agree with your assessment of who’s finished the day with a net loss.
Why does it have to be in this tone? It's honestly even worse because it would put himself on a pedestal.
If he was truly worried he could simply have a conversation about said worry. You are just reframing to a different threat.
Unfortunately, they must now face the court of public opinion, which has not had the best track record lately.
And yet you haven’t managed to tell anyone what these “invisible” aspects are. So it kind of just sounds like you’re making things up.
Obviously, Radon has every right to know. But not us.
Do they have to currently? No, of course not. But this isn’t someone claiming that another did something behind closed doors to bait public disclosure. They opened this door by making the claims, from a standpoint of whether one might want to do business with replit in the future it’s entirely reasonable to ask for proof of what otherwise are slanderous claims.
If all you had to do to get a company to reveal all its secrets were to sue it on some plausible legal theory and conduct discovery, everyone would do it.
well excellent that we're not in a court here on HN or Twitter then. If he decides to intimidate someone without putting any concrete evidence up for it we're well within our rights to drag him over the coals for it. Dogs that bark don't bite, if he wanted to avoid this he should have gone to his lawyers directly, instead he's already issuing half-baked apologies in this very thread. Which means he has zilch and just wanted to bully a recent graduate into taking his product off the internet.
If the CEO had engaged with Radon in a rational civilized manner the situation would have never reached this stage.
Unfortunately it seems to be taken down.
A few reasons why there's so much anger, in my estimation:
- When you support a project, you want its leaders to embody decent values.
- You have always projected an image of someone who's "nice" and doing things right. You cannot bully your intern in private and keep that image.
- Most importantly, you are now in the Goliath position and you are acting tyrannically. It's hard to side with someone going "I have raised $20M and I will use it to crush you" to their previous intern. The fact that you did not explain your concerns, jumped straight to legal threats, and did not want to talk after the project was taken down looks quite bad. If you had approached it in a more diplomatic fashion, you would not be public enemy #1 on HN.
Understand the position you're in. You wield a big stick; speak softly.
P.S. it's perfectly understandable that you'd have concerns about the project, though IMHO it's an overreaction. That's not the issue. The issue is _how_ you approached it.
A gracious response? No. His apology was not an apology at all. His apology can be distilled down to: "I'm sorry, but I'm still right - and I'm only sorry because the community has called me on it."
Toxic? Or warped perception?
Also, my intention of responding in line was appropriate in my opinion. The parent to the CEOs comment was very well defined. The CEO made reference to it being good advice. In my opinion publicly acknowledging good advice without following through on it seems hypocritical. That's my opinion.
Finally, appropriateness seems to be an odd argument given all of the public inappropriateness from the CEO directly. The CEO has had many openings to right his wrong at this point, yet has not seemed to have been able to bring himself to execute on that.
With the backdrop of publicity - I just don't buy the apology. Maybe next time Amjad will be better, but now - he's on the hook.
Considering your existing cred, I'm sure many in the community would give you the benefit of the doubt if addressed the issue head-on and explained what was infringed instead of what reads as emotionally charged responses. And if you're holding out for legal reasons, I imagine that would make the community more outraged because it escalates an accidental bad faith incident into a intentional one.
If you didn't seriously consider obtaining patents for your efforts (and then decide to keep them as trade secrets, for whatever reason) then they're probably not valuable enough to jumpstart lawyers.
At the moment, I think you've done a fair amount of damage to your company's reputation. If I were on your board, we would be having some hard conversations right now.
Ethical lines are not legally relevant.
I have offered to pay the student's legal fees in exchange for putting the GitHub repository back up, with the provision of reviewing the contracts he signed with you to ensure there is no terms that he could be violating, after review with my own lawyers.
I was also considering working for your company when considering changing forms, but I never would after hearing about this episode.
Your remarks about "YC shouldn't fund copycats" are especially ironic given that Repl.it is by far not the first company to make programming online easy to do. I was involved in acquisition of Cloud9.io (now AWS Cloud9 IDE – the original site has been taken down from the Wayback Machine but you can see plenty of their work in articles if you search Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=cloud9+io+startup ) – they provided an online IDE, terminal, full Linux environment, and the ability to program in many different programming languages.
Personally, I don't have an enmity against copying. If you copy what another company does and execute better, that's progress. Amazon.com was just the Sears catalog with a website and faster shipping. But it's sadly ironic that you have this negative view against idea-copying while your own company is dense in a space of competitors that offer online code editing and evaluation – some of which have already exited, as I mentioned above.
OP, if you choose to bring the project back up, please reach out. I know some college professors who may be interested to be your first customers.
Just some Cloud IDE history
Some personal reflection might be in order here before making harsh judgements. Your current employer (Facebook, according to your bio) has done far worse far many times, wouldn't you agree?
Multiple recent companies are making the rounds with clear unethical behavior: Repl.it, TripleByte, Lambda School. A founder seems to be unreasonably kicked from bookface. Meanwhile PG and friends show support for these actions while waxing on about how they are extremely particular about the moral compass of founders.
All that said, Dark and Prolific being kicked out of YC yet PG apparently supporting Replit is... making me wonder why the fuck PG wrote those articles.
I'm always finding it very odd when people act like this - as if there was some super power involved.
That you don't _really_ believe it matters to nobody but yourself.
Well, you can, of course. But I wouldn't bet money you're right.
It'd be interesting to know what pg thinks, since he vouched for Amjad in the first place. But the whole "X liked Y, so X endorses Z" is highly suspect logic, to put it mildly.
either you believe that people should act ethically even if that means forgoing actions that they are legally allowed to make. if you believe that, isn't it wrong to build a free, open source competitor using all the knowledge you just got from working inside a company?
or:
you believe that business is the law of the jungle, and everyone is free to do whatever they can get away with legally. in which case why is it a problem for amasad to get lawyers involved?
it seems this dude's victimization relies on holding amasad to a higher standard of ethics than he holds himself. maybe he should because he has more money and power. or maybe not?
>"Replit version had the same run button placement tho".
Seriously? Is this something to be expected from someone who claims to be an open-source evangelist? It seems like as soon as you received the email from Radon on his project, You sent it to your lawyers and asked them for few pointers to threaten this kid to take down a 'potential' competitor.
Besides, The funding related statements in your threat clearly motivates the reader to consider that you really don't have anything of legal merit to blame Radon of copying Replit.
P.S. We had a small exchange earlier last month[1] regarding your new cryptocurrency fund for small projects/startups, Which I eventually added to my curated list of startup tools after informing you. I'm removing that.
All things equal, this is not a baseless assumption; not only profit maximization vs. altruistic sharing are drastically different objective functions; a funded for-profit usually has more agency, including agency to play foul. This is not a crowd that is startup naive, people are familiar with the range of stuff that happens.
That said, you've explicitly intimidated the guy with the depth of your funding, then attacked their character despite the fact that you had tried to recruit him, so we are not even operating on assumptions here.
Now you'll have to waste some of that funding on PR consultation and damage control. A lose-lose for everyone.
Companies do not own someone’s expertise. This includes domain knowledge obtained in the course of their employment. If you wish to reserve the right to exploit an invention, patent it.
For everything else, I refer you to Intel vs NEC over the cloning of the 8086 (spoiler: Intel lost).
How would you have felt, and where would you be today if Codeacademy had threatened to sue you instead of being nurturing to your project?
The "repl" part of Replit is open source. Your argument ends there. You can't take it back. I could literally fork your repo and I'd be "copying" you by your logic.
I understand that you may not be able to describe the invisible long-term proprietary flaws for a number of possible reasons, but can you ballpark the number of these critical flaws that are the unique IP of replit? Or at least the relevant number of times when the code in this recent open source software overlapped with years-old mistakes in the Replit code base that are so crucial that they must be protected?
So just saying it has the same flaws as my product by no means implies anything. Very well may mean that the other person didn't notice it or de-prioritized it, just like you when you started the project (which is why the flaw exists in my product at first place).
Max Shawabkeh was one of the first engineers working on Repl.it and is hardly given any credit
This is a talk he gave back in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfxH-JDF7Xk&t=81s
https://replit.com/talk/ask/Who-is-Max-Shawabkeh/26386
Utterly appalling. It was only a matter of time when all this would catch up with you.
I wonder how many YC startups came about from employees of a company failing to get buy-in from their employer about a better way to solve a problem and leaving to start their own company to do it. Many of those will surely have copied large aspects of their former employers' products, including the flaws.
I've upvoted your comment for the value of your perspective and information about your own history with replit predating CodeAcademy, and I appreciate that lots of us feel protective of our ideas and the capacity to benefit from the work we put into executing on them.
But... "no argument will convince you?" While it's sometimes true that people hold positions they didn't reason themselves into and can't be reasoned out of, I've found "no argument will convince you" is often indicative of the fact that the speaker considers their position a prima facie reality, which is another way of saying they didn't reason themselves into it either, and therefore may also be underappreciating the merits of a countercase. Or, perhaps as common, they've abandoned the merits altogether and are attempting to narrate themselves or an audience through a lowering of status of those who disagree.
There are real questions about what a knowledge worker has a right to take with them after they leave, and you'd probably find lots of people are amenable to the idea that an employer has some legitimate claims. If it's true that this project "copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws" then maybe that might even persuade people if those don't look like natural decisions for the domain, appear to involve some novel problem solving, and/or weren't made public.
But the person on the other side of the argument:
(a) clearly didn't think they were doing anything they needed to hide from you
(b) has already outlined why they thought all their technical decisions were either not unique or influenced by things you'd made public when you made it clear you felt badly treated
(c) sure seemed to be making shows of good faith vs being met with threats of using capital to fund an aggressive legal response.
Those might be the reasons why many here are taking a critical posture (vs, say, reflexively siding with an open source project).
You may find you don't care if you can persuade those who disagree you. Sometimes that's a wise course. You may even exercise the privilege to take this to litigation. But if you really feel your opposition is in the wrong here and want to make a winning case either socially or legally then you're probably going to have to engage some of those points on a more compelling basis.
pretty petty decision to threaten to sue your former intern for his weird move.
also, threatening someone with money is a pretty surefire way to look like an asshole.
similarly petty decision to spend hours documenting everything to post on HN and start throwing mud in public.
everyone seems well within their legal rights but ethically seems like there were a lot of off-ramps for someone to be the bigger person and none were taken.
It seems worse to keep quiet if you are being bullied by a well-known and respected person/entity more powerful than you.
and i see your point, he seems to be within his rights to do this. even if i would be pretty irritated if someone ripped off my idea after working with me, it's problematic if he is being bullied from doing so.
i don't know how that extends to ethics though, which seems to be the theme of his post. either there's a moral code and i think he's shading the wrong side, or its the law of the jungle and then the ceo is free to use a lawsuit to stop him.
i think it's just the general sense of thirst and drama that i get from his blog and emails that make me think he's really after the publicity instead. which he has accomplished.
How else do you protect yourself against an entity with much more power and money than you?
this case: build literally anything else except for the thing that he paid you to learn how it works.
ianal but absent some nda seems like it's probably legal for him to do it.
it just seems like kind of a dick move. i could mentor new engineers, wait until someone told me about a really cool idea, then steal it from them and build it myself. there's no law against it, it's just is kind of a dick move and seems kind of wrong.
as noted above, ceo is acting like a dick as well. but i think the way this dude is trying to play the victim through clickbaiting HN is a bit much. just my opinion.
A company already has advantages: they have money, they have a time to market advantage and they have more manpower / combined experience. If that is not sufficient, then maybe the company simply needs to improve or needs to accept that it cannot succeed.
Are you sure he really 'ripped off' anyone in the first place? The first thing I thought of when I read this article was 'that sure seems like the same thing Jupyter was made for'. A quick google shows that Jupyter was a couple years ahead of Repl.it, and I doubt that Jupyter was the first to come up with a web app REPL shell in the first place.
im not saying any of this is illegal. just weird to copy your previous employer's tech stack, open source it, and try to play the victim and clickbait HN.
As someone else pointed out earlier in the thread, he kinda asked for it:
> It is unethical and would be obviously so to outside observers as well. Feel free to consult your mentors or people with more experience than you in the industry.
Seems like outside observers mostly don't agree.
i actually agree that corporations have too much power versus individuals in society. but it's a bit much to jump into the gorilla exhibit and then write a clickbait post about whether it was unethical.
Hard disagree with this one. The other options are to either give in to an aggressive threat or take the risk to get sued into oblivion.
This is the only defense for someone in their position against an aggressor with millions and lawyers, the power differential is huge.
It's extremely common to do that. Where do you think all this industrial open source software comes from? People work on a product, then they leave the company and want access to a similar tool. Happens all the time.
EDIT: I mean the screenshots are irrefutable evidence of how bad this has escalated - it started as a normal convo and went downwards like the CEO was out to get some blood for no reason ... now I guess you're gonna get a lawyer threat letter to take down the whole blogpost because you've revealed private conversations without both parties' consent?
Absent any NDA or other contract, there is nothing requiring the other party’s consent to publish correspondence in the US.
Finally someone raising the valid point about "it all depends on the legal paperwork signed."
> 3. Offensive to a Reasonable Person: Publication of the private facts in question must be offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities.
The question is about whether it is illegal to publish a private email.
> There is a difference between copying a feature and actually getting intro a contract, and access to the code, copying it and calling it open-source.
> As a matter of principle, when someone goes into your home and steals from you, even if it's not material, you have to respond.
EDIT: Added quote. The implication seems to be that he thinks source code was stolen and this has nothing to do with design.
[0] https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/#is-replit-rig...
"it" could refers to the feature, not the code. That sentence is clearly ambiguous, the meaning slightly change based on what it refers to.
The most coherent interpretation of that sentence is that "it" refers to code in both instances. However, the intent of a sentence is not always the same as it's most coherent interpretation and "it" misuse is a frequent cause of unintentional ambiguity. (That's why I qualified my statement with the "implication seems to be" language.)
But your interpretation seems way too generous when he compares it to going into your house and stealing from you.
That sounds like a a disingenuous way of admitting that he knows he’s lying.
What if you invite them into your home and then 2 years later you see they have decorated their dogs house with obvious inspiration from your own home decor.
The lesson for me here is to internalize how I'm no longer the struggling kid from Jordan fighting for more than a decade to build something, and that I now have a responsibility towards our community and supporters to be kind and model better behavior. I'm sorry I let you down and I promise to do better in the future.
“I guess it’s just because of how I had to be as a struggling kid in Jordan” is the tell. He obviously has no idea why this feedback is happening if that’s his conclusion, so how can he apologize for any of it? He’s still retweeting sympathetic viewpoints on Twitter as we speak, so you can compute the honesty of this apology based on that fact alone.
Read “do better” as “avoid generating compromising receipts wherein I twice trot out lawyers and my ability to pay for them like I’m dramatically unsheathing Anduril, while privately maintaining my view that I’m being ripped off at every turn because someone had the gall to use Docker to build a REPL and I consider that clearly genius architecture to be sensitive intellectual property.” His takeaway going forward is to threaten people in a smarter way, and I’d bet my next paycheck on that.
Honestly, this whole saga is a hell of an invitation to compete against repl.it, in displaying such a severe decision-making and tactical weakness at the executive level.
1) You apologize, but basically the other person did something wrong?
2) You invoke sympathy for being a "struggling kid from Jordan fighting for more than a decade to build something" ; so what? So now you're the victim?
Your reaction to all of this is comedy gold. Hire a PR person (who never would have signed off on your comment), do some management/communication courses and start being professional. You're running a business, and you don't look the part. Did anyone in your company screen your comment and say "this is a good response, post it"? I doubt it.
The lesson here is never apologize on the internet because that'll be thrown back in your face.
But besides honing communication skills and maybe tune back his ego some (for the future), do you really think the whole situation (including his apology) would not have been vastly improved by consulting with someone knowledgeable in PR?
If you think his apology sounds sincere and is worded appropriately, or his Twitter activity since the fiasco, does (or has done) him any good, then I guess we disagree on this.
Say someone punches me and out of anger I stab him. I apologize for stabbing him. But I'm not going to say I was the bad guy unequivocally, because I wasn't. He punched me and he punched first. He's at least, like, 10% the bad guy. That doesn't mean my apology for stabbing him is insincere. I regret that part 100%. But it's not wrong for me to say "I still think he shouldn't have punched me" because otherwise it's like I'm admitting to stabbing him for no reason, which isn't true.
I get that one goal of an apology is to make amends to people who have been hurt/offended. Those people understandably want to see the apologizer grovel without hesitation. But humans have both a head and a heart, so shouldn't being accurate in one's apology be an equally important goal?
Not taking a side here either way. Just something I've noticed about the social expectations around apologies in general.
Not “I apologize for stabbing them BUT they started it”
The latter is just trying to justify and excuse the bad behavior and save face. A true apology shows remorse and that’s it.
Ok, but in the example that was given, it does justify it, a little bit.
It doesn't justify it completely, but I would absolutely have more empathy for someone who stabbed someone out of some amount of self defense, than I would for someone who stabbed someone for no reason.
Do you really believe, that in the stabbing example, someone who stabs someone, for literally no reason at all, is exactly the same as someone who did it, in response to being assaulted first?
You think these 2 actions are the same, or is it that 1 situation is probably not as bad?
Kindly take your sealioning elsewhere.
Ok, and in the situation of the stabbing/assault, you really think it would be unreasonable for someone to point out that they got attacked first?
That does not seem unreasonable. If someone got attacked, and then responded with too much force, it would still be reasonable to point out that someone got attacked first, while also saying that attacking back with too much force was bad.
In the case of someone getting attacked first, it is both OK to point that out, and also say that the response was over the top.
If you disagree then you are basically saying that attacking someone unprovoked is equivalently bad as to attacking someone in response to an attack.
And I am not sure why you don't recognize the importance of also pointing out that an attack was in response to another attack.
That seems pretty important to point out.
It is pretty reasonable to both recognize that something went too far, while also explaining that there was a cause to it, and that it was in response to another attack.
So? The wording of his apology leaves doubt about its sincerity, which (in addition to the whole ordeal to begin with) lets me believe he would greatly profit from training and advice on matters of communication.
I don't understand what you're trying to imply. That 'PR' automatically seems insincere somehow? Well, better a safely worded statement written by PR than a crude comment that lets your ego shine through, doesn't really remedy the situation and worsens it?
uh, yes? I think that is a pretty reasonable statement. I am not wise on the ways of PR firms but my expectation is that it would involve a lot of some one else using your voice to smooth feathers while you went and were absent for a while. I'm just not seeing a world where hiring a PR firm results in better more sincere apologies. That would make a frankly incredible article though.
The vast majority of people just don't have any experience with public communications. Most people write shit that does not get read by anyone, especially as they develop their skills.
When a person without these skills attempts to communicate matters that require a certain amount of care, they are bound to fuck up. Now, does this mean that they're actually a "bad" person? Maybe. Should they learn how to communicate in ways that don't inflame the situation, but calm it down? Absolutely. Irrespective of what their character or intentions are, being able to communicate effectively is absolutely crucial.
In this case though, my personal opinion is that this person is just a huge jerk. He seems to have raised a lot of money, seen someone do a legitimately better job than what his firm (which raised a lot of money) did, had conflicting feelings, and just wanted to seemingly quash this little person with his new found power. Regardless, a PR firm would have at least been someone he could practice his message with, get feedback on it, maybe that process itself would make him reconsider his actions.
And importantly (arguably, more importantly), how it interacts with perception of sincerity. I don't know about other people, but to me, if PR is involved, I treat every word as manipulation, unless there's a strong reason to believe otherwise. Maybe there are PR firms that enforce 100% honesty in communication, but if they are, it doesn't seem to be a common occurrence.
And doubly so given the context. Amjad may be a CEO, and the apology is public on HN, but this is still mostly a personal conflict - it would be weird to involve a PR company in a personal dispute.
Using a PR firm might result in him just having some nice sounding text, instead of understanding the error of his ways and fixing it.
Incidentally, I have no opinion on whether he should apologize or who's more in the right. I just think it would be beautiful to see a person in his position be completely honest, disinterested, and forthright
Have you ever been obnoxious to anyone? How would you hope others would treat your apologies for poor behavior?
Textbook abusive behavior.
I'm not saying that Radon was wrong or Amajad was right, by the way. I'm constructing a hypothetical about how one should respond if they really didn't do something wrong, because an apology seems inappropriate, and this comment seems like it's taking the assumption that Amajad is in the wrong without actually backing up that position.
Oh my, this is a classic poor response to this. Though you did apologize, which is good. You still are saying the intern is wrong, which isn’t good. This response may cause more issues than it solves.
That’s a good thing. That’s what happens when you have integrity. There is no reason to change his position on the subject of ex-employees making clones of the product.
Obviously I completely agree with this in a vacuum, but you seem to imply that that is what happened in this case. It was pretty clear from all the emails posted, assuming they were materially unaltered, that this isn’t what happened here. So your comment seems like a bit of a non sequitur, unless you’re saying that is what happened here?
There’s nothing here that says he’s stolen code or any IP. The CEO doesn’t even claim that he’s stolen real IP. Everything that’s similar is public knowledge and the burden of proof is to point out what’s been stolen.
Which the CEO could! Because the work was open sourced. So he could reply and say, “hey, you implemented this part in a way that is in code you worked on. It’s also a pretty atypical solution to this problem, so it seems reasonable that you took that from us.”
He doesn’t.
Instead, he gets insecure that a kid implemented a similar product in a couple days and decides to rail on him, then offer a half-apology well after it has blown up.
A lot of people are very unclueful about this, especially young people, and maybe Mr. Masad could have had a gentler touch. But for the blogger to have cloned the product or part of it without (pinky swear!) actually taking any IP from the employer, that might in fact be legally true, but it’s a walk across a tightrope.
This also applies to your nod toward “a novel fair use argument” in a sibling comment. Fair use has absolutely nothing to do with this or any hypothetical like it. You may as well have cited bird law.
Copyright isn’t the blanket IP concept people think would cover most disputes. These types of cases get into trade dress, patent law, and other legal concepts. The fundamental limits of copyright are why software techniques are patented in the first place and one reason among many why you sign assignment when you join a company.
IANAL and my comment is U.S. biased. At least in the U.S., the fixed and tangible aspects of copyright are bite-sized enough to understand without a J.D. Given how murky this entire field is when it comes to IP, it’s extremely important to understand these concepts for even a line engineer, as well.
Theft of intellectual property in the case you cited also barely touches copyright. Put another way, copyright status of the property in question is largely immaterial to securing a conviction on the allegation.
Again, you’re coming off uninformed here and relying on Wikipedia (which doesn’t speak to that context) isn’t really helping.
Clean room design doesn’t protect you from patents. That’s not how patents work, simple as that.
I know how patents work. I hold 15 and I’ve defended two at trial. I’m tapping out here, since you’re simply competing with me to be less wrong the deeper this goes, and I’ve rapidly run out of patience to have intellectual property law explained to me by someone who doesn’t understand the fundamental purpose nor qualifications of copyright, and thinks it and fair use doctrine has any bearing on “I built a clone of Facebook”.
If you have the time later I’d love to hear how you can legally infringe on a patent with clean room design.
> Fair use has absolutely nothing to do with this or any hypothetical like it.
Yes, it does. The commercial effect of the usage is a factor in determining fair use, and that might distinguish a “show and tell” project from a “production-ready” OSS project.
And this is in fact false. See https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=191354689554...
Taking the analogy of the punch/stab example from one of the cousin comments above, it would be really strange for people to believe that because you apologized for retaliating the original act of getting punched was blameless.
Of course the analogy of physical violence is more explicit, less vague, less nuanced than the context of IP. If he wants to explain/assert his moral/philosophical ideas on IP, then it should be done separately in a more nuanced, detailed manner than what he's been doing all this while, which is acting out in retaliation of a seemingly small threat.
This also shows insecurity/weakness. He could have acted as/been the bigger person but gave up on it on every turn.
[1]: https://twitter.com/pnegahdar/status/1402018604233732098?s=2...
So apologies are good but this seems the weakest sort of apology possible.
And he still believes that some ethical line was crossed.
What is ethically wrong is bullying a former intern with legal threats. You need to learn this, I guess the hard way.
This is why such a statement should have been avoided altogether, especially if the other side seemes to be cooperating.
I mean, yes, that's definitely the case, isn't it? Punching below your weight is seen as unethical, right? The power dynamic is an important aspect of deciding the ethics of actions.
If they copy your idea they can literally destroy your existence given their resources, size, visibility, infrastructure, etc. If you copy their idea you first have to make many things better than them before even scratching on their turf.
And before anyone says power dynamics are not relevant in ethics: In my philosophy studies I also studied ethics and yes — power dynamics are very relevant for ethics.
Who says this? Certainly we have intellectual property laws to protect novel, recent, and specific ideas. However, “Running code on another machine” doesn’t seem to meet any of those criteria.
Not a popular opinion on a mostly US site, I know, but as you can likely guess I'm not American (or Chinese or Russian for that matter).
The problem is when a large company muscles small ones out unfairly (using their clout, money or lawyers to push competition out).
> The lesson for me here is that I now have a responsibility towards our community and supporters to be kind and model better behavior. I'm sorry I let you down and I promise to do better in the future.
Fixed it for ya!
> The lesson for me here is to internalize that even though I'm just an unfrozen caveman lawyer, I still have a responsibility towards our community and supporters to be kind and model better behavior. I'm sorry I let you down and I promise to do better in the future.
It's easy to become emotional and protective of a project you've poured blood and tears into, which probably kept you up at nights, amidst all the FUD.
At the end of the day, the world is better with Replit than without it. A world where any kid can learn to program with a dirt cheap device anywhere in the world without dealing with dependency hell is worth fighting for.
A lot of young kids and future builders and innovators look up to you! Please remember to be humble and kind as Replit, snd you, gather more influence.
Lmao amasad, this shit is priceless. LOL
What did this kid steal from you, by the way?
I remember when repl.it was a black shell that evaluated Java expressions. It was quicker to Google your page and type some Java one liners, than to create a main.java file and use javac. Once you added that ugly online code editor, it was all downhill. Now it's some kind of online coding platform. Gone are the days of that quick and useful repl.
That said, I think behind the 20MM and the shiny designer buttons, the core tech boils down to that same little black shell, which must be why you felt so threatened by a junior dev with too much time on their hands.
And if we are being honest here, 20MM from investors is not that much. I routinely see investments of 500M or more in various startups, so sit down and focus on your core product, before another intern decides to run compilers in a docker instance.
You let investors get into the head of that kid from Jordan long enough to become the litigious villain.
For shame.
You haven't let _us_ down, you are only harming yourself and your company. I believe what you need is some self reflection, and a PR agent who can handle these situations for you with bland neutral language. Without these you will never do better in the future.
[1] https://intuitiveexplanations.com/assets/replit-email-9.png
Use that "lot of money" to get top PR instead of "top lawyers", and maybe some "getting head out of ass" classes, cause humility and decency is something clearly you won't be able to learn.
"Second, we’re also excited to announce one of the first (of many!) projects that Amjad has worked on with us: Codecademy Labs, the easiest way to play with JavaScript, Ruby, and Python online." (http://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codecad...)
Hmmm...
Replit will be fine... think of the level of effort it takes to create a truly great product and all of the polish your platform already has. The key for you is to just stay focused on innovating and serving your customers!
All the best!
--harris
Pretty sure it's a personal recount.
I know the Repl.it team, including Amjad, and they're all some very upstanding people. I'm biased myself.
Often there are localized judgement errors, and treating people via threat of the law is both a mistake (IMO) and also an unfortunately reality for running a company. It's hard to make a determination of what we'd all do if not in the shoes where a former employee is potentially stealing your code/IP.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
glot.io[2] is another, which seems to fit more in the realm of "pastebin with runnable snippets".
As I understand it, a big sell of repl.it is that they have some kind of collaborative editing support, which none of the alternatives I was able to find in a few minutes of digging have. Google Colab has this, but only support Python (AFAIK) and is not open source.
1 - https://github.com/TryItOnline/tiosetup
2 - https://glot.io/
In college, I made a website and I thought another student "stole" the idea. I considered my legal options, but I'm glad I stopped there, even if I did have a case.
The other student was never a serious threat to my idea and in fact lost interest in the idea next year. So the only harm I suffered was to my ego that thought I deserved power over others just because I had an idea slightly before someone else.
I buy into Radon's argument that Replit has substantial value outside of "eval()" and is not actually threatened financially. As a result, I could understand a founder feeling disappointed at discovering clones, but I think it's important to separate harm to ego from harm to livelihood.
Bingo, especially the whole "we now have the resources to crush you" attitude. Someone please make sure these jokers never get money and power again.
In your example you probably did the right thing by not persuing. But you could have also persued and fought a needless battle. Or it could have gone the other way: You could have overcome yourself and even teamed up with that other person.
Finding people doing similar things can be very shocking, because it threatens your self image. But it is also a chance to learn and grow, because who other than the person doing similar things as you did is someone to learn from?
Every time I read a story like this I just hope the business dies, and for any employees it's time to jump ship, you really do not want to be working for a CEO who makes comments and threats.
Time to release that source code, have 100 clones appear and let this loser sue everyone into misery - I'm sure his investors won't be best pleased.
For now let's spread this story (make a backup! He'll want this taken down as it's terrible PR!).
Hope replit rots.
I just wanted to encourage everybody to chill on it for a moment and wait to see what’s up, because my spidey senses are screaming “miscommunication / crossed wires” rather than malicious intent, for what it’s worth.
EDIT: Fuck. https://i.imgur.com/cFYq7Nv.png
I'm going offline for awhile to focus on family matters. Evidently, I am not a good judge of character, and I need to stop believing in people without really knowing them.
I don't think he was twirling a moustache, but it seems like the idea of being cloned is very personal to Amjad, and he gets emotional about it. You see this both in this exchange and in previous tweets about "copycats".
But look at this from an “out of body” perspective for a moment. Isn’t it just a little convenient that the first thing you read, right at the top of that blog post, is also the most cartoonishly evil thing? Are you absolutely certain that we’re not missing some crucial context here? How often have we seen this kind of outrage where, later on, it turns out that was a lot more complicated than we’d originally assumed?
All that said, yes, you’re correct. And that’s really all that matters. But I can think of a few other things that might be going on (admittedly, I have to be pretty creative to think of something plausible, but they do exist).
I’ll keep reading and start asking around. Maybe the cartoonishly evil thing is the true thing, but if it’s not, at least I won’t have fallen for it.
(And it it was the true thing, I will be hat in hand with apologies. Heck, I’d be the first to bring a pitchfork if this was true at face value.)
And I believe that not only were his intentions good, but also his actions.
Although I would still like to hear Amjad’s side of the story.
I saw this pop up while I was out driving to the gas station, but I was so shocked that I wanted to urge caution. Now that I’m back, I too will look carefully at all sides. Thank you for vouching for Radon — it helps to know that this isn’t just someone with a chip on their shoulder making up stories.
Admittedly, if I have to reach for “maybe it’s a lie,” it’s not looking great. But the fair thing to do is to wait and hear from amjad.
What kind of stuff have you done together? I haven’t worked directly with Amjad, but some years ago I almost joined, and we’ve since thrown around ideas for how to use ML to build some great tooling at replit. He strikes me as extremely reasonable, and I’ve seen him change his mind from talking with him. (It wasn’t just a technical plan that he changed his mind about; it was a tricky social situation thing.) I didn’t get the sense he would stomp on someone.
I agree it’s possible I was off the mark, and if so, I’ll readjust. But I believe in him. So I won’t let myself be dragged to a certain judgement without listening to the other side of the story first, no matter how bad it looks.
But it’s fair if other people don’t feel that way. It’s just, the inside situation often looks much, much different, y’know? It’s good to wait and see.
This.
I feel it's likely your GP comment will turn out to be the most constructive one on this whole thread. It seems like a clear case of bullying, but if Amjad is like you describe then one must postulate some additional factor(s) to account for his behaviour.
I'm reminded of a story I once heard about a sweet little old lady who suddenly became highly irascible and it turned out she had lead poisoning. These things happen. God forbid, it could be a brain tumor.
I suppose we can only wait to hear what Amjad has to say.
I don't know you, but I really don't think you're making that up. And that means, as a scientist, I now have to contend with the new evidence of "a longtime personal friend of the author, who seems quite reasonable to me, is saying that the blog post should be taken at face value."
...I'll keep asking around. It's not looking good, but it's also unfair not to listen to the other side.
Welp. Time to dive in to the details of this post. Fwiw, if it's genuine, then I empathize greatly with Radon; I've been in a similar situation, where I wanted to build a business but decided against it due to vague threats. I can only imagine what it'd be like to have the threat of sic'ing YC's extremely well-paid lawyers on your ass to hunt for any small violation of your employment terms that they can leverage legally.
Ugh. It just sounds so frickin' cartoonishly evil that I'm having trouble even forcing myself to admit it's possible. But I do admit it's possible.
Can I ask, have you spoken with Radon about this? Did you get the impression that there might be some details omitted, or ... anything? Something other than the cartoonish evil story that I'm being asked to accept as true.
(I admit I'm reaching pretty far with this line of thinking, but, it's possible that there was some crucial context omitted from the post. If so, a five-year college friend should be able to sense whether something like that might've been the case. I'm hoping maybe you did, and maybe you'd be willing to say so if so.)
EDIT: I’m still a bit in shock, but it turns out that you’re completely correct. Thank you, very much, for vouching here for Radon.
He sounds cool.
You're doing it wrong.
Nor do I want to commit the fundamental attribution error, like 80% of this thread. Even though there are a few other people offering personal experiences of Amjad rubbing them the wrong way. That tends to happen in a thread of this character.
Here's my best guess: your friend had a bad day and fucked up. Then he doubled down, and now it's out in the open.
Good news is, this is salvageable. He's not getting MeTooed, he didn't embezzle money or steal code. He got paranoid and bullied a former intern.
I think a simple apology and some self reflection would go a long way here. There will always be a mob which takes that as blood in the water, and will say awful things on Twitter. But the bulk of the community, the people who matter, will notice, and accept it if it's sincere.
The CEO is continuing to double down today, more than 2 months after the original conversation, so I'm not sure that's likely: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369
If the intern did steal code, the CEO only wants the project to be taken down?
Any IP agreement worth their salt would require Replit to send a formal/legal request asking the intern to destroy and return any stolen IP.
So I call bullshit on the CEO, and the intern should probably sue Replit for slander.
If the CEO is making the stealing part up (seems likely) the intern probably could sue Replit. Intentional copyright infringement/trade secret violations are a crime and my understanding of US law (not a lawyer) is that that makes it actionable regardless of damages.
Should he though? If he wins it seems likely he'll get nominal damages. He'll have invested a huge number of hours of his life into it. He'll be risking being on the hook for some or all of his lawyers fees depend on how the judge feels about awarding costs.
It doesn't seem likely to be worth it. Public shaming of Replit like this is a very cost effective way of punishing Replit... the legal system not so much.
This way you had to expose your own code, but it would easily win you the case in the court of public opinion. The only reason not to do this (that I can think of) is that the intern did not actually copy your code.
"I'm not a business person."
Radon only needs to say it once, it's straight and to the point.
Now at Replit, Amjad is claiming not to be a business person either.
Over and over again.
But those DMs were other people. I got silence. And I spent all day pondering what the hell had just happened.
You're right. This is the first time I've ever posted someone's DMs without their consent. And yet for the life of me, I can't bring myself to feel even slightly bad about it.
In that vein, I'll post here what I DM'ed him with five minutes ago. https://gist.github.com/shawwn/150f2711efc1d4a7821806ec23aeb...
I don't know whether he'll listen. And me making it public will make it even harder for him to listen.
But you know what? I felt the switch flip from "on" to "off" for "do I care whatsoever about repl.it?"
And that's sad. I was... just, such a huge fan. Still might end up one.
People usually feel like "yeah! fuck this dude! I hope X bad thing happens to them!" in situations where there's a lot of outrage. But all I feel is sorrow. I grew up on HN, and by extension YC's mission, since HN = YC was true from 2007 til ... 2015-ish, I think. That's around the time the cynical masses truly overwhelmed the YC founders, and they all fled off to Bookface. Who wouldn't? I've been curious about bookface not because of "oh look, a bunch of powerful people are here," but because "man, I bet so many interesting conversations happen there. I wonder what they're like."
pg and jessica forged YC's reputation by hand, from day one till now. It was not easy. And I hate that this incident has made me question whether I was falling for an intelligent rich person's selfish ploy this entire time, and all those words about earnestness (http://paulgraham.com/earnest.html) and niceness (http://paulgraham.com/mean.html) were just a siren's song for the young and the naive.
Thankfully, I know I'm not wrong about pg being genuine. he writes lisp. amsad writes js. :)
the only other thing I want to say is, I'm so sorry to Radon for casting so much suspicion, and making up completely crazy theories. You didn't do anything wrong. I was wrong.
Keep on building stuff, and everything will work out.
(Firstly, to dispense with your reply: ditto! If you're using your position of power to punch down at powerless people for vanity reasons, we probably wouldn't have much in common anyway. The synonym for that is "abuse.")
He ended up not saying much, and I did most of the talking. I was mostly working out what to make of all of this, and testing the waters about whether I was foolish to still give the benefit of doubt. But as I kept talking, I got the impression that maybe the magnitude of what happened had hit him, and that perhaps he was being genuine.
I've been a really shitty person in my past. It cost me my best friend, which was a wake-up call. If certain people hadn't been willing to extend me the benefit of doubt, I would've ended up spiraling further into depression rather than working on myself and improving. That's why I truly believe in everybody's ability to change, if they take a hard look at themselves and their behavior.
The two things that restored my faith in amjad somewhat were (a) he seemed to actually care that "he let me down," which I didn't expect. As for (b), that will take more context, but humor me: I thought amjad's apology was posted online somewhere. So I started talking about ways he might be able to approach Radon and chat with him. I mentioned that Radon's 5-year college buddy showed up in the thread to defend him, and that perhaps amjad could reach out to them as an intermediate step. It would show that amjad wasn't, in fact, a mustache-twirling demon brandishing a pitchfork – it helps to have a third party's opinion on that. But mainly I was just nudging him towards apologizing to Radon directly.
amjad said he'd called Radon and apologized. I didn't expect this. I've fallen victim to manipulative people in the past, and neither of these actions were typical behavior of those kinds of people, in my experience.
Look. Think whatever you want about amjad. It's probably reasonable to think he only apologized because of all the outrage. All I'm saying is, the vibe I got from him was the polar opposite of someone who was just doing one of those standard PR containment maneuvers.
The whole reason I believed in amjad in the first place was that he was willing to do things that others weren't: to be goofy, to chase oddball ideas, etc. And I ended up feeling like he was genuinely unaware that his pride was getting the best of him – that he was so caught up in his work and himself that he forgot to think about what he was doing. So perhaps that's where the lawyer bullshit came from: it's fucking hard to build a company, let alone one that's on the path towards "massively successful."
That's not to excuse any behavior. It's a reminder: any of us could get tunnel vision, and forget to think about other people, or how they're treating others. Again, lost my best friend from doing exactly that damn thing. It's shockingly easy not to give it a second thought until too late: to feel like they owe you something because X, or that your behavior is justified because Y.
When the reality finally sinks in, you end up sort of in a state of shock. Or at least I did at the time. And – I might be completely misreading this, since evidently I do – perhaps he felt the same tonight.
So. Points in his favor. One, he took responsibility. Most people would rather go to the grave than admit they were wrong, let alone self-reflect or change their behavior. Two, he went straight to Radon and tried to make things right.
A word on Radon. When you're the target of a threat like he faced, as I once was, this type of thing can haunt you for years. You end up not really trusting whether people are just going to fuck you over, or second-guessing whether you were in the right, or other destructive things. And when you're facing someone who's casually waving legal threats at you, you're never quite sure how far they're willing to go. It could be a bluff, or it could ruin your life. It must've been pretty scary. Thank you for having the courage to speak up and say that this happened.
All that said: obviously, form your own opinion. You've seen today how easily mine has swayed. But I couldn't go to bed tonight without at least trying to put in a good word for someone who went out of their way to make things right, for what it's worth. Which is approximately nothing, but perhaps it rounds closer to 1 than to 0.
**
Friend, the best thing a person like you could have done in a situation like this was: nothing--to not get involved.
Instead, you have really, really gotten involved. You seem to have taken it upon yourself to attempt to direct the public perception of these parties' respective characters by investigating and pronouncing judgment on him. You privately inquired as to the inner self of this person you admire(d?), and then you published your private correspondence (within mere minutes), implying it to be evidence of bad faith. You've written at-length about your personal experiences with the man and how your feelings about him have now alternated between admiration and contempt (probably several thousand words now).
You seem to feel like his possibly mistreating another person is equivalent to his mistreating you, personally, and so you join this crusade (or brigade?) against his reputation--perhaps with some hesitation at times, nevertheless with vigor.
**
Why?
**
It's disappointing that the only person who pointed out the natural consequence of your actions was heavily downvoted and finally even chastised by dang. He was trying to do you a favor, but keen language is frowned upon here--it's required that one dress up one's arguments in verbosity and appearances of ambivalence. (I can imagine how a classic writer like Twain would be treated here, but I digress.)
He was certainly right: anyone who has seen the way you've reacted to all this would be wise to keep interactions with you to a minimum. Otherwise, someday you might do again what you've done here, and with friends like that, who needs enemies?
(Yes, I know, Radon did it too. Still rubs me the wrong way.)
but Ycombinator: "It's all about the founders blah blah blah" - if their process finds and funds these kind of people, the process is broken.
[0]: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/colorado-pay-transparen...
To follow a tangent for a second, this doesn't seem wise on Colorado's part. It doesn't strike me as great law to begin with, but I'm willing to concede that point: the problem is that it creates a considerable regulatory burden for an all-remote company which takes on a single Colorado employee.
As someone who works remotely since well before the pandemic, I'd be pretty upset about this if I were a Colorado resident. I have family in Colorado as well, and while I've never seriously considered moving there this law makes it even less likely.
This kind of catastrophizing doesn't contribute. For one thing, you jumped from "this kind of person" to "these kind of people", without supporting evidence.
Do you have a process which can identify, in advance, everyone who is going to be an asshole to a former intern? While picking enough winners to make bank? Please share!
Not much of a jump: "kind" at the very least strongly implies the plural already. If you mean just one person, you say "this person", whereas "this kind of person" means "this person and others like him". AFAICS "this kind of person" and "these kind of people" are pretty much synonyms; the only difference between them is that the former is grammatically correct.
Oh, if I had two wishes from a genie, first would be world peace, second would be being a native English speaker.
"these kind of people" is ungrammatical ("kind" is singular, "these" and "people" are plural).
Maybe in this case English isn't as hard as you thought. :)
Let's iterate some famous startup founders. I could totally see them going off like this. Steve Jobs? Check. Elon Musk? Check.
Not defending bad behavior, but from point of view VC bad behavior is not necessarily a dealbreaker if they can deliver a unicorn.
Maybe these situations are not the norm, but they are certainly happening.
Between this, and the story the other day related to founders bragging about taking advantage of certain vaccination site - it certainly seems that there is a basic "asshole filter" somewhere that YC does not have tuned correctly. Alternatively, they do have it tuned - and they don't mind assholes so long as they make them money... But yeah, YC should probably respond to some of this. Even if it's not a trend, it seems to now have the appearance of one.
I say good job Radon and if you ever want a job doing open things for fun where a company wont't sue you afterwards, ping.
This behaviourk... it is not just unethical from their side, it's also showing their lack of belief in their company or vision. If I was an investor, this would be a bad signal boost for them. And if I was you, I'd open the project again, work on it even more and tell them - sue me. This case would never stand, it's like a McDonalds employee making a burger at home and McD suing them. I just wonder, who the fuck does Amjad think he is? You aren't even innovating, this amount of ego-driven bullshit is a tell-tale sign that they wont do anything note-worthy except remain a glorified wrapper-as-a-SaaS. Reading this, I'm pretty sure I'll never use their product again.
In fairness, they are doing this as well as offering him a job (see the second email screenshot in the article).
I think the threat to sue was posturing, the same way that legal charges are always trumped up to get you to accept a plea.
If you had let them see it through, and they intended to sue you, you could have churned up a horror-inducing PR nightmare of a shitstorm for them.
If someone is really as petty to light cash on fire suing a young person with no assets over baseless claims, let them do it.
Litigation is expensive, you could have qualified for a public defender while they burned company assets, or just have represented yourself.
I say this as someone who isn't a stranger to the courts and judicial system.
Dragging random people through court without any meaningful expected outcome sure doesn't seem like something VC's would like to fund. I'm not a VC though. Do they just rubber stamp whatever bullshit behavior from a CEO?
We only have one side of the story so it's hard to tell what exactly is going on here.
VCs give money but they’re not going to micromanage the company unless something becomes a major distraction. Given how much the VC model involves finding things to monetize, I would not expect strong pushback against a claim that they have IP to protect (that’s an asset which the VCs co-own & intend to monetize) and if they have a lawyer on retainer it might not even be much of an expense to pursue early on.
Hopefully by publicizing what happened, he might get an offer for legal defense if necessary, then reinstate the project.
> I say this as someone who isn't a stranger to the courts and judicial system.
This wouldn't be a criminal case, how are public defenders relevant?
For not being a stranger, you seem sort of unfamiliar with the potential downsides of being involved in legal action, the existence of damages/remedies, etc.
In general, that's only for criminal matters. At least, that's what the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel pertains to.
That said, sometimes public defenders are appointed in certain limited non-criminal proceedings, but a case about intellectual property is not one where you'd qualify for a public defender.
I think taking it down (temporary at first) is prudent in that situation, but I agree about the apology. Don’t apologize unless you agree you have done something wrong.
I question this is you are saying that welcoming a lawsuit is a good idea for a side project. That could be years of expensive headaches for literately zero gain other than being able to say I get to keep my side project up.
Probably because he actually did do something that, if not explicitly wrong/illegal, then at the very least on the borderline of being so.
And he has very little to gain by fighting this. He got his clicks and likes already. What would he need to website for?
Slightly unrelated: I used to shamelessly promote repl.it a couple years ago, but no longer do because their app has become so bloated and hard to use that it's discouraging to beginners -- recently I tried to remotely help a non-technical friend w/ an assignment and we must've spent ~20 minutes dealing with account creation, sending the correct invite link, and making sure we could both see our changes; it felt like a terrible waste of time especially as I kept reminding them "I promise it's worth it this app rocks!"
The app used to actually be awesome back when you could spin up an env in seconds, send the link to a friend, and immediately start collaborating.. Hopefully this will be the nail in the coffin, or at least lead to a mass migration from the platform.. :/
Okay, I can live with having to be logged in because it keeps me logged in for a long time, but do I really need to figure out what I want to call this "project" which is two functions and a print that I never want the world to see?
For a few glorious years, repl.it was exactly what I wanted when it came to writing derpy little one-off functions.
A company feeling threatened enough to risk a PR nightmare on a one man open source project, when they know better than anyone that their real value is in scale, account features, UX, etc.
If your product is threatened by this, it's probably not a very good product.
I've used Repl.it multiplayer to interview candidates in the past, will probably look for an alternative in the future. If anyone knows of one that supports non-web languages (I already use codesandbox for frontend) like python, etc. this is the chance to pitch it.
How about a locally hosted lxc container running nothing but sshd, tmux (to share a single tty), nano and whatever compiler/interpreter you need? If you want to get real fancy and edit the same file, kakoune has a collaborative editing feature.
I might not value my time enough but right now I really don't get the value proposition of 70% of saas businesses trending here.
In the very least their poor decision making will now cost them a massive deal, so now there is a positive spin :)
Let's assume that this person did just copy the replit design (which I don't believe they did), so what? If it was able to be "cloned" in a weekend or two, clearly it wouldn't really be sufficient to take down replit, so it seems that the CEO of replit just thinks that if you've ever worked for their company, any time you work on any kind of vaguely-similar REPL software, you should be taken down.
It's not like this is unique; corporations just seem to immediately assume that anything you did after seeing their brilliant and elegant code must be the reason for your success.
When software is both your hobby and your profession, you have to think carefully about what you mix and how. The developer also goes onto state that what he did is nothing new and he decides what repl.it's IP is on their behalf. Is this hinting that he wrote his new project in a similar way, but he believes it to be nothing special?
Obviously the CEO's response was deplorable, but also probably a lesson to a new developer about mixing work and hobby.
After they added the account requirement and seeing this blog post, I think I'll have to change my opinion about them.
I think it is good thing that people start punish these CEOs who believe they can do whatever they want and that world revolve around their product.
This isn't surprising given Dale Carnegie's first principle from "How to win friends and influence people"
1. Do not criticize, condemn, or complain
> people do not blame themselves for anything, and therefore they don’t take criticism well
I think I can understand where Repl.it is coming from. All I know is this behavior (by Riju author) isn't something I would personally want to do. Join a company, leave, and open source something that is directly related to the company's business model, whether it undermines their profits or not. It's standard for companies (other than Apple) to say "work on whatever tech you want, but if it competes with us, we should evaluate it that's OK."
I would at least have gotten their buy-in on the project or idea first. Especially given this commit message:
> repl.it superiority!!
I also wouldn't use intentions or the fact that it currently has less traffic than Repl.it as example of why this is harmless. I would approach this with an empathetic view to how a company would see an engineer leaving and then open sourcing something directly related to the company, based on what they learned while working at the company.
Everything you write would apply for someone on vp level with opportunities and stock option.
Get down from there.
We're not talking about IP. The company had nothing technical that the writer stole from them.
What he did was not even comparable as a product to what they created!
"the ethics of trying to open source a similar project to your old employers product is morally ambiguous at best" would have applied if he had made a product at all!
I don't think it's bad at all, considering replit is itself built on open-source software, and the CEO is a loud champion of open-source software, and the intern's project only explores one relatively small aspect (number of languages supported) of the problem space while purposefully ignoring all the other stuff necessary to build a competing product
If he didn't directly copy code or steal IP or some amazing trade secrets that he contracted never to share, then there is nothing wrong either legally or ethically.
IANAL but if he signed a non-compete maybe this could be a legal issue.
https://slidebean.com/blog/startups-zoom-company-story-eric-...
- The company's version is not sufficiently original. IANAL but there are many sites that do something similar to replit, as shown in the blog post.
- Your version is sufficiently limited that it falls under fair use, or sufficiently minimal that it falls under the "de minimus" exception*. The guy made his project by himself in 4 days, and explicitly mentions that it does not have, and he has no intention of adding, the features it would need to compete in the marketplace with replit.
* https://www.jgschwartzlawblog.com/the-de-minimis-copyright-e...
If nothing else, your conflation of "design" and "idea" doesn't make much sense, because the two are treated vastly differently by the legal system.
Designs may or may not be covered by copyright depending on how specific they are.
There is no protection on ideas.
You can most definitely leave a company and start a competitor doing exactly what you were doing in your previous role. California laws specifically encourage that, and that is the main reason why Silicon Valley exists.
> I worked for Replit in Summer 2019
Also from the article, regarding Riju commits:
> 2020-06-05 df9ba38 Initial commit
"I can understand" to a degree. That's what time-limited non-competes are for. I think a lot depends on what he signed as he was hired and/or leaving Repl.it - was there a "you can't work for a competitor for x years" type document? Was there something worse?
And that's not talking about the fact that some states bar non-competes and it was over a year after he left repl.it, what's the odds his non-compete was for that long?
We obviously have one side of the story - and we know how he said/she said stories end up - but from what's being told, it seems like he's been away for long enough that non-compete to be flimsy at best and unenforceable at worst.
> repl.it superiority!!
It's weird to have that commit message and then to claim Riju is unrelated and not a clone of Repl.it.
And then having Twitter threatening to sue.
A CEO flexing on an early-career SWE is the height of nonsense, but this sounds like an early-career mistake to make on the engineer's end.
For the SWE it's a project, for the CEO it's existential. Of course this could go south.
Not empathizing with the founder other than noting it would be sort of predicable for the founder to react like this. IP is big
Incredible that had to scroll so far down HN to find this comment.
Bad taste? Unethical? I think that's going too far.
Since the open-source project here doesn't seem to be running at scale nor having support for user-accounts or anything as such. Is working on an open-source toy for the sake of it - somehow unethical because it's related to a previous employer's product?
I work for a financial institution, and if i create a small bit of opensource code in the future (after leaving my current job) that relates to banking, is it unethical or wrong?
Quoting the blogpost,
>there were 38 visits to Riju during the month of February. (Half of those were probably me.)
>the architecture was limited to running on a single server
>Riju categorically lacked all of these features, including: having a user account, saving your work, sharing your work, publishing webapps, persistent workspaces, discussion forums, integration with GitHub, etc. etc.
Barring of course, specific trade secrets or patents. But I have seen none of that here. And, "this kind of looks like what we have" is not a valid legal argument.
An employee of a company left, and then made an open source clone of the company's software. The fact that the software was easy to clone or that others had done it previously doesn't seem really relevant. Several times I have left a company, and I could replicate a good percentage of it in a couple days too, not because it was easy, but because the months/years of experience I had building it the first time.
Whipping out the lawyers and bragging about his funding is idiotic and childish, but I think asking for the project to be taken down is completely reasonable. (on that note- I kind of think at this point that you have to be a megalomaniac to be a funded startup founder)
If there’s any dispute here, I think it would be over the copyright to the cloned code (if it really is a clone), but the article doesn’t mention anything about that, so I suspect it isn’t actually cloned at all.
I am just taking the author at their word though. Could turn out that they copy-pasted large chunks of non-FOSS code from Replit or something.
Both acted childish. One being an intern is understandable, Replit CEO should have acted little more mature.
I mean, can you imagine a world where the email was "Hey that is great work, but I'm worried this is stepping on our toes a little. Can you take that project down?".
And then honestly the more I think about it the "why dont we offer you a job!" -> "most difficult intern we had" (note: quotes not intended to imply literal quote here) is really troubling.
The author builds a clone of a product for a former company, shares the project with the CEO, and expects them to be happy with it? And "out of nowhere" they are suddenly displeased with the project and (rightfully IMO) feel like some of it was copied from their business. What universe does this person live in? It's a fair point that several other competitors copy the UI and I'm not suggesting this is illegal or disallowed, just that there's a huge lack of common sense to think a former company would be happy to see a project like this.
The author is digging a further hole by making all this public, it's not a good look IMO. I'm all for competition but there's a severe lack of tact here.
That's assuming it is a "project" to "get off the ground" in the first place. What gave you the impression that this was something the author was going to try and take commercial? I never got that impression.
> It's a fair point that several other competitors copy the UI and I'm not suggesting this is illegal or disallowed
But you are suggesting it was that way around. I didn't quite see that either; on the contrary, I got a kind of distinct impression that some of these other projects predate Replit, including its UI design.
Experience. It's all too easy to say "oh I didn't _plan_ to make a business" and later on say "well with this overwhelming support I'd be stupid _not_ to make it a business."
> But you are suggesting it was that way around. I didn't quite see that either; on the contrary, I got a kind of distinct impression that some of these other projects predate Replit, including its UI design.
Oh sorry I did not mean to suggest Replit was the original creator of this UI, as you mentioned it looks like they all copy each other, I'll update my post. That's beside my point though. I will point out it's rather disingenuous of the author to not include a side-by-side comparison of Riju/Replit, instead he posts pictures of some other projects.
Is it really that easy to get VC funding for these types of things? Like Jesus, if all it takes is some ideas and moving to SF to secure funding like this, then I have a whole bunch of ideas worth 100's of millions that I would love to sell.
Which makes the reaction weird.
Consider that funders and investors like the parent reply will say "huh, that's so easy it isn't worth that much money" and it won't be that weird.
That said, this trend where such disputes are made public including personal details continues to shock me. It must be my European perspective.
In particular, just screen grabbing personal conversations and publishing them to the world without permission, with the person's full name, and then adding accusations...I find appalling.
You may believe it to be quite alright if the person in question is only evil enough, yet I still object even in that case. It breaks the basic expectation of private communication. It smears the person publicly, whom may see his online reputation significantly damaged, possibly forever.
It's impossible to defend yourself against public smearing, as the more you try to counter it, the more attention you give to the original issue, only further increasing damage.
I must be old school to believe that private communication is to remain private.
Furthermore, the victim (whom I fully believe to be a victim) just showed to the world how easily he doxes work relations, which doesn't look great for future employment.
Again, I'm morally on the side of the blogger, but I believe this article could have been far less intrusive by leaving out specific names of individuals. You'd still get the point across.
The real truth is of course that I'm old. Private communication should be treated as a thing of the past. Youngsters don't acknowledge this code of honor, and therefore one should treat private comms as public.
I do however appreciate that one would expect private communications to remain private, but in this case I think it was warranted to include such details. Basically, I don't think there is generic approach toward revealing private communication, and it should be done on a case by case basis depending on how important the details of such conversations are.
EDIT: I would also point out that:
> "Furthermore, the victim (whom I fully believe to be a victim) just showed to the world how easily he doxes work relations, which doesn't look great for future employment.".
My impression after reading his blog post was actually the opposite, I would hire the blogger in heartbeat if I could.
Or, he could include the literal chat, yet blur the person's name and photo. I'd still object to that, but it's better.
I fail to detect why to make his point, he needs to reveal full identity details. I consider it a nuclear option, but I guess others see it as just "normal".
I tend to agree with your last bit. The guy has a strong moral compass, and clearly is a technical talent. I'd hire him based on that, minus this communication style.
In contrast to the CEO, who said along the lines - we got a lot of money and we have lawyers.
Don't get me wrong, in no way would I defend that guy or any of his words. That's not the point. My point is that private communications are expected to remain private, even more so in a work dispute.
Or so is my belief. Which seems an outdated belief.
I generally agree with your sentiment at an emotional level, as most of the time I find it to be in poor taste to share private conversations, however there’s not really an expectation of privacy in professional correspondence. For instance your company can freely monitor what you do on your work laptop if so inclined.
"however there’s not really an expectation of privacy in professional correspondence"
Uhm, yes there is. Internal company email as well as email between companies is expected to stay between the sender and receivers. Almost every corporate email footer mentions this explicitly.
I'm quite convinced that neither employers or employees would be cool with their emails being dumped on the internet for all to see. Every time that happens, it creates headlines.
Professional correspondence is very much expected to stay confined to its intended scope.
Also, the author's full email [0] doesn't do him many favors; for a discussion of a project that purportedly consists completely of open-source and public ideas, there are a ton of redactions. Like:
> "You're right that the existence of ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ was initially brought to my attention by my work at Repl.it. But then again, it also shows up on lists of popular ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ for JavaScript."
I'm not a lawyer, but I simply just would not have written that first sentence. Hopefully ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ is something like "React.js", and the author is just being overly zealous in the light of Replit's legal threats.
Second, we’re also excited to announce one of the first (of many!) projects that Amjad has worked on with us: Codecademy Labs, the easiest way to play with JavaScript, Ruby, and Python online. Now, after you learn with Codecademy courses, you can use Codecademy Labs to create your own programs, share them via Twitter and Facebook, and show your friends what you’ve learned.
Unlike Radon, he commercialized his "clone."
It doesn't matter morally that he cloned what his previous employer did (and it's hard to argue that Radon's tool is a clone to begin with, not that there would be anything morally wrong with it), but it does highlight his hypocrisy.
He also spent 3 years at Facebook between Coder and Repl.it, so it's not like he walked out the door with the idea.
If it weren't for the INCREDIBLY detailed, well-reasoned, documented blog post, and its ability to reach the front page, the tactics of the CEO would have actually succeeded. He did, indeed, take the project down, and took the threat seriously. What the CEO didn't anticipate was the intern's ability to get so much exposure on this.
I can see this tactic working 95% of the time, which is prob. why when it doesn't it REALLY doesn't.
"We're the most ambitious software startup in history." [1]
My second interaction is this one ...
The CEO should have recognized that this is a guy who is interested in this space and should have made every effort to hire/acquihire him. He may have had to use some of that VC money he was going to pay the lawyers but that would have been the best.
If I were a VC in this company I would be very concerned by the immaturity of the CEO.
EDIT: one more point: Would ReplIt be now the Copycat if they add the support for languages that the OP had added but were missing from Replit?
I hope there's more to this story than it seems, because Replit has been doing lots of good work and this would lower my faith in them...
It is a time-sharing system where you can log in and use a programming language.
We have had those since not long after the dawn of computing.
Since at least 1970, we also had smart terminals that allowed the user to fill in a form, and validate it, before sending it to the host.
So the time-sharing session being carried out by a protocol between the web front end and back-end is not ipso facto original.
Needless to say, neither is the idea of a repl running in a separate process that provides editing, with expressions sent out to a running image for evaluation.
What you've said is all true, but most users today don't use computers like that. Arguably developers already do if they have SSH access somewhere, but if repl.it brings that experience to a general audience via a web browser then it's already valuable.
If the Chrome cloud VM idea[1] can raise millions in funding, so can a web timesharing system. ;)
The context of this HN post is about originality itself.
in general yes, but in this case the criticism is warranted when Replit is claiming that that the open-source toy project somehow stole their idea
No, no; for that it absolutely doesn't. People pay for all sorts of goods that are not original, like loaves of bread, pairs of sneakers or T-shirts.
It had better be original if you're going to harass former interns that they're ripping off some intellectual property, and threaten them with lawyers.
That's all.
You're right, though I still think repl.it has some right to be protective of their IP here. The originality of the service is in the ease of use and modernizing the old timesharing idea, so while they were quick to mention legal action and acted obnoxiously to their former intern, they're right to be weary of something that looks so similar to their product and judging from the emails even in the implementation details.
I'm off to work on a pitch deck for coding bootcamps for cats.
This comment has quite the Dropbox 'build such a system yourself quite trivially' comment energy
Is the plan to lose money on each user until they reach profitability? How do they plan to make money?
But still I'll make an effort to stop using repl.it going forward. What a scumbag move.
In case anybody is thinking of building -- I'd happily pay for a similar app that let's you write/share private repls, with third-party package support (yarn, pip, nuget, maven, etc.)
I honestly don’t know what has caused this change.
Having lived and worked through the last startup boom, it's easy to see why. Startups as a force in our economy and our culture were (once again) new and interesting and untested and exciting. You could make an app and be an "instant" millionaire! Money was flowing freely - the Bay Area office-warming parties from newly-minted Series A startups were a sight to behold.
Of course we (I) saw it all with rose-colored glasses; reality is always more complicated. Years have passed, and the plucky upstarts have become capitalist overlords. Many vested interests have worked hard over time to establish an alternate narrative where tech is ominous, unaccountable, and used for political ill. People are people and do shitty things, even at startups.
It's all just people and always has been, but for a time it really did feel special. Maybe I'm just old.
> There is a difference between copying a feature and actually getting intro a contract, and access to the code, copying it and calling it open-source.
> As a matter of principle, when someone goes into your home and steals from you, even if it's not material, you have to respond.
https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_...
Lots of great stories on folklore.org, recommended reading!
edit: CTO -> CEO
According to him, he didn't:
> "I worked for Replit in Summer 2019, where I was asked to rebuild Replit's package management stack and make it open-source."
Also isn't the entire point of an internship to learn from a company they're working for? Are they worried about their own current internal employees quitting and starting a competing repl.it clone?
A bit shitty, IMO. Wonder if it's worth the hit in reputation.
It seemed more like an emotional reflex by the CEO than a calculating ploy to suppress competition. Still doesn't bode well though.
> Every similarity between my project and Replit can be explained by looking only at GitHub repositories and blog posts that were published online by Replit itself, making them obviously not any kind of secret.
I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to copy their design even if it is public.
Most of the bullets under "In my opinion, the answer to this question is no, for a number of reasons" also seem beside the point. It's not allowed, or ethical, to copy an existing service just because yours is free, or "not intended to compete".
That's not true. This depends entirely on the license of the relevant (repl.it) GitHub projects that the author is referencing. I don't know of any open source license that allows you to copy & modify code but somehow forbids you from reusing intangible design elements.
This case is a little confusing, since it sounds like a case of simply producing a similar result _without_ copying any code from the repl.it repo. But given that you can copy the code to get the same result (again, assuming a FOSS license), I don't see how the license could forbid someone from using the same design _without_ copying code. But IANAL.
replit is not open source though. Only some parts of it are.
You can infringe copyright without copy-pasting code. If I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, burn my only copy of the book, then write and publish Jerry Schmotter and the Alchemist's Gem, a novel about a teenage boy with a star-shaped scar, etc., I'm probably infringing copyright even if I didn't word-for-word copy any part of a Harry Potter book.
There's a reason why "clean room" design exists; to maximally protect yourself against claims of infringement, you want the implementers of your copycat product to not even have seen the original implementation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Copy-pasted code is a smoking gun but it's not necessary.
(I really have no idea if replit would have a case though. Seems dubious. But generally Copyright law is murkier than what some programmers think.)
> Every similarity between my project and Replit can be explained by looking only at GitHub repositories and blog posts that were published online by Replit itself, making them obviously not any kind of secret.
to mean some similarities are explained by a public blog post, not by a repo. A public blog post does not give you license to copy something.
The only real similarities are the use of a green colored run button near the top (Which replit stole from IDEs anyway), and the basic, black screen terminal on right, white background text editor on left layout.
>I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to copy their design even if it is public.
He is arguing against the allegation of violating their trade secrets. The similarities being based on public information makes them not valid as trade secrets. If you publish your trade secrets, they are not trade secrets anymore.
Repl.it is a company with no moat. They are features are literally used by dozens (check the number of runs of the repls)
Only companies which are so insecure about tech get into petty fights with college interns.
I guess the thing I keep coming back to is whether or not a CEO even has the power to engage "top lawyers" to settle a score with a former intern. I'm just kind of imagining the board meeting, where someone asks "how is that hiring going for a new principal engineer for the foobar team" and the CEO replied "we scrapped that position, I'm using the money to go after this intern that duplicated our website over the weekend."
I have to imagine the reply isn't going to be "oh, great idea, keep me posted", but rather something more like "uhhhhhhh.... can we not?" Like, it just doesn't seem like a good financial decision to me. Let's say this is a solid case (which it isn't; or at least, nobody can point to the patent that's being infringed, or the literal source text that was illegally copied, or the NDA that Radon signed). The best case is you get a few hundred thousand dollars in damages. But the intern doesn't have that kind of money, so best case, it gets paid back in installments over many, many years. You are trading the opportunity to use that money right now to grow your company and make your investors rich, at the cost of not teaching some intern a lesson. It's unclear what sort of positive effect that could possibly have on the future of your company or an intern. OK, interns won't clone your product. That was pretty unlikely already, and reimplementing an idea is a lot easier than running a business.
I guess I just don't see the point. All I can say is that Amjad was mad and personally hurt, and people do dumb things in that position. A CEO should see past that and say "you know what, I'm going to save this as a draft tonight and see how I feel in the morning". He didn't, and the company is probably over at this point. A lesson for us all -- sometimes you're mad, and can't do anything about it. Focus that energy into making your product better, or going for a run or something :)
Finally, I guess to sum this up, it makes me sick to my stomach. Threatening someone a year out of college with financial ruin. Who does that!?! I feel terrible just standing by watching this.
Traffic lets them sell data, charm investors, and maybe improve their service to a limited extent by analyzing that data.
What do they have to lose by bullying you, since they have lawyers on the payroll already?
You could ask a lawyer if you have a chance to win in court.
Perhaps the EFF would like to grind their teeth on Replit and create a precedent: https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance
Understandable... but bullying people via email will take away even more traffic from their site (because of bad reputation) if the conversation goes public (as it usually happens).
This is unprofessional and downright nasty and vindictive to a degree that I find almost unbelievable.
God that little comment has really made my blood boil. I’m going to be avoiding repl.it from now onwards.
I think it causes a lot of frustration for them and is present in a lot of different industries. In the spirit of pragmatism, this is what I think it looks like if you'd like to avoid this pattern in your own career management:
- event happens driven by an IC-type
- a conflict happens over the event which exists on the narrative plane, where facts are fuzzy and emotions/identities get pulled in.
- the IC-type tries to get out of the conflict by listing a roster of facts, and sort of miss the boat on understanding that narrative conflicts don't really care about those facts.
- IC-types, totally justifiably b/c yeah facts matter when sourcing intent, are some version of befuddled or angry or whatever, usually try more facts, but nonetheless the conflict just stays around
- ultimately, they totally miss "the why" on why the conflict is actually happening, and as a result they are usually on the losing end of it
This blog is chock full of this approach. What it really reminds me of, and why I mention it, is a series of essays posted by a well known, long serving, but non-mgmt reporter who was fired from a famous paper recently. Same issue. Facts themselves and the nuance involved made things look at least understandable, the narrative launched for other reasons, and the reporter was fired. The reporter issued a series of essays staying in facts-land after getting fired, highlighting the facts-driven counter the reporter tried while in-house. Despite overwhelming facts, you could tell the reporter just wasn't aware of what had actually turned against them/what they actually had to address if they wanted to stay. He was speaking Language A and the team he had to work with was speaking Language Z.
Addressing a narrative isn't bending to it, but you need to counter it with something other than/in addition to the facts. These narratives can stay a long and have negative impacts much longer than you can "be right." Find the language of your criticism and make sure you counter in the same language.
But more sad than that, to me, is that creative energy on both sides isn't doing something more novel. A company doing something an intern can clone. An intern facing a sea of unsolved problems that chooses a space that is covered, as he points out, many times over.
If copying is the highest form of flattery, why flatter your former boss so much?
I understand no one wants the small guy to be bullied by the company but it's ridiculously naive to assume that the entire truth is contained in that blog post.
Running docker containers and giving them a frontend shell is not complicated enough to have "trade secrets". Given OP's code can't scale at all.
This is just an insecure CEO
Unbelievable and shameless.
[0]: https://twitter.com/will_ye_/status/1402016586953678848
Edit: Amjad has been tweeting a ton of stuff along the lines of "oh you can be too popular on HN, hivemind bad" so expect to see him pull up the blinders and act like the world is crazy if he ever sees this. Amjad, you treat people poorly.
Oh, so one of those "I'm a contrarian, therefore I'm awesome" type of people?
As for the way they approach things, ye the CEO is from YC getting praised from PG on twitter, his Ego is beyond the moon and acts like it, dont expect anything more. Also Replit is INSANELY overvalued as a product.
What? There is no indication of that. What are you trying to say?
Further more it looks like a CEO that can't innovate and the only options is to innovate through litigation. Must be something about that VC money burning a hole in their pocket to send lawyers vs adding features, marketing, or capturing new users.
Copy, paste, threaten with lawsuit?
=> new product ready to launch
All big three cloud providers monetize other people's open source projects by renting out hosted versions. Apparently, that's OK and highly profitable. So why look down on a startup CEO attempting to replicate the cloud success story?
"Fuck You. Sue me if you want, you won't get a damn penny because I don't have it. And how are your VC's going to react to you wasting their money on a frivolous lawsuit. Come to think of it, I'll be reaching out to all of them to ask that very question..."
It's just not that hard of a problem to solve, and not that special. Docker and Linux containers in general are the real innovation that has made it so easy to implement these types of services.
Really pathetic on Replit's part to feel threatened and go after a weekend project like this.
Also a healthy response would be to issue a C&D - assuming they have a case here.
But this? We don't have all the details and Replit might well be in the right here, but still - that's not how you handle such cases.
And I should know, because I've been in trouble regarding my comments on HN with a company I used to work for, but the communication on their side was firm, polite and professional.
It looks like the history of Cloud9.io's independent website (before it was AWS Cloud9 IDE) is now offline, and not in the Wayback Machine, so I can't link you to it, but you can see plenty of articles about the company in Google Search, some of which have screenshots of what they offered:
https://www.google.com/search?q=startup+cloud9.io
They provided a very similar experience to Repl.it except you had a fully Linux development environment at your disposal, complete with a web-based IDE and terminal, auto-completion, and a suite of sample projects to get started with. Repl.it seemed like a copycat to me when I first learned about it. They don't have the same user experience model, since Cloud9.io required starting up a "workspace" for the language you wanted to use (very fast – instantiating a Docker container on a shared fleet); but close enough that I'd call Repl.it a clone-like competitor of Cloud9.io.
Cloning a competitors isn't inherently bad. If you think you can improve on the user experience that they offer, then that's incremental process. But the hypocrisy of claiming that cloning other companies is wrong while engaging in it yourself rubs me the wrong way.
Radon, if you want to put the GitHub project back up I'll be glad to mirror it and offer to pay for your first $100k in legal fees should you be sued by Repl.it. If the UI that you built is based on a UI that's published on the public company blog then I believe their claims will be tossed out of court pretty quickly.
I'd also encourage you to get touch with the Electronic Freedom Foundation. They they are a nonprofit that may be able/willing to provide legal representation for free.
P.S. Before considering this offer to pay your legal fees final, I'd want to review all previous contracts you've signed with the company, and consult my own lawyers. You seem to live in California which does not enforce non-compete contracts, so their only legal to stand on is that you misappropriated company intellectual property.
> There is a difference between copying a feature and actually getting intro a contract, and access to the code, copying it and calling it open-source.
> As a matter of principle, when someone goes into your home and steals from you, even if it's not material, you have to respond.
If you don't want your virtual cloud sandbox app to be copied easily, build something that actually is novel. For example see Stackblitz https://stackblitz.com/ I think they're going to completely destroy all these Replit-like models.
1. I am not lawyer but:
Is threatening someone with legal action illegal? Yes, if the intent is to resolve a good-faith dispute without litigation. But the threat of legal action without the intention of taking it may constitute extortion. Note that the person making the settlement request does not need to be right that the claim is winnable. But it must be made in good faith.Feb 24, 2020
OP needs to spend some coffee money and ask questions of a local attorney.
It can be extortion to threaten to involve the police if demands are not met, but this is not that.
Do not apologize, that is an admission of guilt. Also, do not talk to that guy, you are making it worse.
The guy's objective is to kill replit competitors, which is itself a monopolistic practice which is probably illegal.
By the way, the guy sounds like a fucking jerk, I am closing my replit account. Good luck with your open source project.
I did well in all of the interviews, but I had a bad experience at the final interview where I had trouble setting up the React/Typescript/Parcel tooling for the coding project, taking up a very significant chunk of the allotted time. Usually parcel doesn't give me grief and a breeze to set up, but I guess I had bad luck that day. I noted that I should prep the tooling for the stack before any timed interviews in the future.
I finished everything except that part, but I had started to set up the final step with the algorithm set up for it and discussed how to do it in the follow up discussion. It seemed like were impressed by my knowledge and still seemed interested in me, so I thought there was a shot.
So here's the abbreviated email chain:
Amjad: "[...] we can't move forward with a fulltime offer at this time. However, what do you think about doing a 2-week contract project that if it goes well we'd extend a fulltime offer?
If this sounds good to you, we'd talk about the terms of the fulltime offer before moving forward with the contract project so that you have an idea of the potential compensation for a full-time position."
Me: "Yeah I'd definitely be interested in the contract-to-potential full-time offer. [...]"
...then a whole 2 weeks go by discussing over email with him on salary negotiation, W2, benefits, etc. The 2 week contract offer would be at the rate we agreed on for salary, and if it went well then I'd go on to full-time. I thought it was a done deal and he was just prepping the contract, but then a whole week goes by without hearing from him, so I follow up with him.
He replied:
Amjad: "So sorry for the delay, but we decided to go with someone else for the role. Let's stay in touch for future opportunities."
Me: "I don't understand, we agreed on an offer two weeks ago. Is there any feedback you can give me if it's something on my end?"
Amjad: "We didn't agree on an offer [...] so I suggested doing a contract as a way of an extended interview. And then we went back and forth and the details, meanwhile we continued to interview and found someone who's local and a better fit for the role. Sorry, this didn't go differently."
Me: "[...] The way I interpreted it is that you've finished interviewing for the role and wanted to extend this trial-to-hire period, or a hire with a probation period, and if it didn't work out you'd extend the offer to your second pick. You didn't mention anything about an extended interview. [...]"
Amjad: "I thought explaining where you didn't do well in the interview and saying "therefore we can't extend an offer" would be clear."
It felt pretty shitty at the time...
https://github.com/raxod502/python-in-a-box/blob/master/serv...
Are they correct legally or morally? Maybe, maybe not. Are your arguments compelling? Yes but I am not a lawyer and even if I was, the result is the same. Being correct doesn't avoid the legal action. They have more money than you and maybe they want to spend it trying to get you closed down. Maybe they win, maybe they won't but sadly it comes down to the same thing? Do you want to risk whatever outcome they are threatening and can you afford to?
You could always wait to see what exactly they are alleging before taking action but if the CEO is a dickhead then he might not care about the details, and might sign off a few 10Ks of the budget just because he can.
Welcome to business!
The original post is long-gone, but there are a few copies out there [1], and there was a HN thread at the time [2].
He runs DistroKid now. He famously (infamously?) created the site Fucked Company way-back-when chronicling the dotcom bust [3].
It's usually not that difficult to keep work and passion projects clearly separate so that no one could be confused.
I get it, threatening with legal action is harsh. This blog post on the other hand is also not nice. For me personally, I'd rather not engage with either of the two as they seem to not being able to manage a professional conflict without spilling it publicly.
Apparently criticism of companies is "off topic" in such threads, so companies that openly engage in unethical or illegal behavior such as copyright infringement have free reign. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27363823
Somebody needs to flush the toilet and get their shit out of here, it stinks.
Maybe I'm wrong and this CEO is as ill-intentioned as there discourse seems. But, I'm not seeing that from the evidence given.
Feel like we are missing some crucial part of the story though. Doesn’t make sense why would they go out of their way to threaten a small open-source project.
In a just world, whoever now holds the US patents for running-a-gui-box-that-is-network-presentable-and-can-evaluate-user-code (Xerox Parc? Sun? Oh, wouldn't it be lovely if it was Larry's lawyers!) would sue the bejeezus out of your low moat offering out of sympathy with the kid, Amjad Masad.
Reading those emails from the CEO left a bad taste in mouth.
If Replit CEO had any brains he should have thought about hiring OP as an exceptional engineer and work with them.
I must ask, is it unethical to publicly share screenshots of a conversation. I suppose in this case it almost went to court and thus would be public record if it would have. I only ask out of curiosity due to my slight feeling of guilt reading these private messages with only one-party's consent. I don't mean legally, only ethically.
Even still, if you start a project that is very similar to your day job, you’re asking for trouble. Imagine you are the CEO and someone says, “Our intern is open sourcing something very similar to our core product.” That will always look bad and cause a reaction. How heavy handed the reaction is will vary, but every company will react.
Sure, you can plug Monaco into some backend in a weekend. Good for you.
Can you support 100,000x active-last-minute on the same platform?
Can you build a brand that means you even have to be able to handle 100k ALM?
There are better ways Amjad could’ve handled this, but if you’re repulsed by the motive then HN is an odd place to air that revulsion.
HN isn’t odd at all. Replit is YC funded after all.
https://replit.canny.io/general-feedback/p/how-replit-used-l...
but did you use "internal" knowledge of repl it in order to build it?
Enjoy.
[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
"Hi X,. It looks like a very cool project, but I'm slightly concerned that it's existence could hurt repl.it. And as shareholders, that could hurt both of us.
Let me know if you want a video call to discuss further.
X"
We're at 7. https://github.com/adsharma/py2many/
Which is basically k8s but lets you use vms.
I was thinking of using Tekton to make a CI/CD service at one point but I would pretty much need to smash the whole k8s VM/Node every time I do something and only allow one participant at a time. There are ways to run vm pods instead of containers in k8s but there are other issues at play. It's been a sec.
From the email exchange posted [1], I would say Amjad was right in asking that the repository be taken down. Regardless of intent, Radon's actions had given the appearance of unethical behavior. Bear in mind that, when considering ethics, intent is not as important as appearance. While Amjad's statements were not necessarily optimal, I would not fault him for what he said. There are so many other adversities in life -- we should not make ourselves adversaries of one another.
A couple red flags that stood out:
(1) There is an implication that Amjad's time is owed to Radon. Radon's meticulous documentation and other content posted on the Internet is suggestive of overachievement and perfectionism, traits that can be very valuable in many technical domains. Unfortunately, personal correspondence usually is not one of those domains. One should always be most respectful of other people's time. Time is a non-renewable resource of unknown quantity.
(2) Some of Radon's statements and expressions, whether they do or do not contain truth, are quite adversarial and should be avoided in correspondence. Those that stood out to me are "You are categorically in the wrong," "... you have no legal or ethical basis ...," "... I have acted in good faith ... [and] your conduct ... has been grossly rude and unprofessional," "Despite repeated inquiry on my part, you have refused to point to any specific feature ...," "... your characterization of the morality of my actions is baseless and in bad faith," and "It's a shame that you decided to terminate our relationship this way." In all things, regardless of the circumstances, the first rule should be "Be respectful."
While I can imagine myself in Radon's shoes and empathize with what he did and why, experience has taught me that certain norms of civility, whether they be shallow or even illogical, are expected in discourse. My advise to Radon would be to let the whole thing slide. Life will bring so many more unexpected twists and turns; save time energy for life's truly important battles that are yet to come.
I think both parties communicated badly with each other. It is easy to try to look at this in a binary fashion. In reality the situation is very complex and prone to misinterpretation.
There are no excuses for childish behaviour though
It's like y'all have never heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design. No, building a direct competitor to a business you have previously worked for is generally not ethical, and will almost always end up being infringing, because even if you're not trying to copy their code/design/whatever, you almost certainly will.
By the way, allowing users to run their own code, unsandboxed, on your dime, is generally a bad idea. What happens when someone uses it to distribute $illegal_material? Or send spam? Or starts logging what other people are running?
1. Not reacting back in an unprofessional manner which I can assume would be easy to do so as you put some hours into the project
2. Taking this all in your stride and in a way getting more attention to your skill set than the original idea would of done
Congrats!
It's really hard to put a finger on who is in the wrong, because both the former intern(FI) and CEO screwed up.
Out of so many things to build that could be fun, it's wrong to build something that you worked on, where a really good engineer/founder took you under their wings, taught you a ton. To take that and open source the secret sauce of a fragile startup in a competitive market... that's wrong. To publicly show confidential emails without warning - raises eyebrows. And if he is blocking out that much text, then this leads me to conclude he is downplaying their hardwork and innovation.
However, it's wrong to threaten a young budding programmer with money and lawyers and brag about how we are not small anymore, and we have money now(20 million), which is not a lot in my opinion. They haven't built a moat yet.
I really think all of this could have been avoided if the CEO took a more sequential and slower approach.
1. Ask the former intern to take it down nicely. If he says no, then you could ask him to close source certain parts of the program, and drop a backlink to Replit. The CEO could have taken a softer approach - you only take out the big stick when absolutely necessary.
2. He should have gotten on the call after the former intern asked him THREE times pleading to talk to him. I don't think it's right to treat a former starry eyed programmer who respects you like that - to outright ghost him... You spent 3 months mentoring the young grasshopper. I didn't like the way he treated that intern, and let the problem fester. That's not right.
To me the right move is for CEO to be the bigger man, apologize, and try to make it right with OP. That's my assessment, but there could be more to the story...
I would also like to note that this is why you NEVER impulsively write emails late at night when you're brain is tired and judgement a little compromised after a LONG day.
i think that's absolute bollocks.
Replit is not the first to pioneer running code online nor is the open-source project the secret sauce.
The open-source project seems to be a toy he built for satisfying his own curiosity, not scalable beyond a single-server. Something that the guy admits can be brought down by a fork bomb. it has no user-accounts, no sharing features, no persistance -- nothing that makes it the "secret sauce".
To quote the blog,
>Replit’s core value proposition isn’t letting you run code online (you can do this in dozens of places for free), it’s the features they offer on top of running code.
Running code online is not a novel idea that Replit came up with. It's the rest that made it appealing.
I say you use this exposure to actually build a Lyft to their Uber. Show them who is really boss.
Did your internship had any no-conflict, no-compete clause for any future assignments? Or are you infringing on any patent?
If not, there is no need to succumb to this bullying.
I think it would show that he respects the opinion of Amjad, even though Amjad has acted immaturely and completely inappropriate in the first place.
(I'm not a lawyer, so don't interpret this as anything other than a possibly poorly-informed opinion.)
If (in another world) he made this project with commercial motive and used some of the design decisions, would this actually be illegal?
I don't see any hints that patents or trademarks are involved in this dispute in any way. Copyright violation seems unlikely, unless the intern improperly kept a copy of source code that he had access to while he was employed.
I could maybe see an argument for misappropriation of trade secrets, but the company would have to be able to make an argument that whatever specific secret information he used gave them a real competitive advantage, and that they took reasonable steps to protect it. (Having talked about their tech stack in engineering blog posts, as the OP alleges, would provide him with a pretty strong defense.)
If there's no IP infringement, then it doesn't matter whether there's a commercial motive or not.
Or he could get on the top spot of HN for free and get a massive amount of community support, potentially people who actually will foot his legal bill, for the price of a few hours of writing a blog post.
Have you considered that what the person did in this situation was actually illegal?
Yes, when you do illegal things, it is difficult to defend them in court. But that doesn't make him in the right.
It doesn't even look like he was going to be sued, since he took down the website, and apologized.
It was the kid who went public with all of this, in order to get the clicks and likes.
The person used to work at that company, and then they built a similar project, that looks really similar to that other product.
So something to do with design copyright. You can't just copy someone else's designs, in a similar space, at a company that you used to work for. You probably run afoul of something having to do with intellectual property or design copyright.
And keep in mind, repl.it explicitly does not have any patents (which would be the actual way for protecting an idea or design in the way you're thinking) for anything they have done.
Surely people should be able to see how if you work at a company, and then release a product that copies what that other companies does, and you build something in such a way as it looks very similar to that other product, then there is a pretty big risk of running into intellectual property law or any number of legal issues.
This is a broad category of laws, where you could run into numerous issues. That should be pretty clear.
Especially since there are no patents which protect the exact thing you're talking about. There is no such thing as "design copyright" other than actual, specific designs (fashion designs, specific graphics copy) that are copied. Ideas and software architectural designs are covered by patents. Something replit explicitly does not do.
There are a whole lot of laws related to intellectual property, employment, and contracts. It is a very wide field.
When talking about this kind of stuff, most people have not memorized the exact line number, in the exact paragraph, of laws that cover all sorts of things.
We are talking about hundreds or thousands of pages of law here. There is a lot to cover.
But the point is that there are a lot of laws, related to all of that.
And it is should be pretty clear how there is a risk to run afoul of something having to do with intellectual property, contracts, or the like, if you do something similar to what this kid did.
Which are you referring to? Explicitly. As in, cite the USCC or similar statutes.
You have failed to do this when explicitly asked twice now. If you don't know, then don't pretend there's some IP boogeyman and then handwave it away when people ask for sources.
You're the one claiming they're running afoul of "IP laws" so I'm sure you should also be able to say exactly which laws he's running afoul of, right?
It is in fact not clear which IP laws you're referring to, especially when the ones meant to protect this very thing are not being used by replit.
There are thousands and thousands of pages and case law covering all sorts of these types of laws.
I am referencing this stuff in general. When talking about IP or employment law, or any of this stuff, in general, basically nobody is going to be able to quote an exact line number, because of just how many pages in all sorts of laws, that this stuff covers.
Once again, I am talking about all of this stuff in general. Surely you should be able to see how there is some risk involved in this kind of stuff.
Not sure why you are trying so hard to straw man me on these statements.
Quite clearly there is a significant risk in running afoul of something, if you work at a company, leave, and build a project that does the same thing, and also looks very similar to it.
That was my original statement. And it seems pretty clear that there would be some risk in this.
Not sure why you have to be an asshole about a pretty obvious statement here.
But since you aren't actually addressing this statement directly, and have to go off on some tangent, that I never brought up, I can only assume you agree with my original statement.
You don't have to quote specific lines regulations, but you do need to do something to back your assertions besides just repeating "it's obvious" over and over.
Do you really not see how there would be at least some risk, in cloning a former employer's company, with a similar product, that looks the same as it?
You don't see at all, how that could potentially, could at least have some risk, of running afoul of IP laws, or copyright, or any number of things?
Do you admit that there is any risk at all of this?
"Private correspondence" and "contact info" are not (in general) legally protected, and the contents of the email thread and the Github repo would be subject to discovery no matter what.
Sure, it sounds like a generic enough page, and there are plenty like it, but how many have been put up by an intern at a company that ALSO put one up.
Additionally, you'll probably win here at HN, but in all probability you will not get a HN reader as either a judge or a jury.
Might be an unpopular opinion but its mine!
One, you worked for them then took their idea (which they took form someone else) and made an open sourced better version of it. I don't care if you did not use any internal information, it looks like you did to everyone else.
Two, Why the hell did you share it with him? to rub it in?
Three, actually I'm on his side, even though he is acting childish.
I think this makes Amjad look a bit like an ass, but I don't know him personally or your relationship with him or repl.it
I bully a lone open source dev, everybody get fired up, I go front page HN, maybe as the bad guy, but now people hear about me, and total sign-up increase.
Would be devilish, maybe would work?
I don't think the author of this post is in the right here. Most people are piling on saying Repl.it is behaving irrationally. But to me it seems... in line with what an employer should think?
He corresponded with his previous employer regarding a free project that competes with them. When he got a negative response he then decided to air his dirty laundry on the Internet.
It matters in that it gives us a sense of what the norms are.
repl.it's differentiator isn't just being a repl that can run different languages, it hardly competes directly with them.
> When he got a negative response
when he got threatened to be sued* he posted about it, I see no reason why doing so is somehow bad form while threatening to sue is not bad form.
Calling out hypocrisy absolutely matters. It matters a lot.
In this case, it also provides a very important precedent.
In general though, doesn't it make sense to not create a free competitor right after leaving your employer? They may have a case regarding stealing trade secrets given that they did give you access to their codebase and daily ops.
Otherwise I would expect tio to have received some threatening emails as well (maybe they have?).
And for the record, I never liked repl.it because it was usually slow.
I wouldn't immediately assume bad intentions where bad decisions in search for good outcomes were made. To know which one it was, one has to first know the people really well, and know them both when the times were good and the times were bad.
Someone once told me: "Never assume, you make an ass of you and me (ass|u|me)."
Never thought I would have to say that as an American, but it seems like wealthy plaintiffs win too often, and it's not worth the risk?
Hell--this jerk sounds like he might threaten you next with a Libel lawsuit. Think about deleting this post?
If they do sue, and win you have a judgment against you. If you don't have any assets, they can't do much, but you don't seem judgment proof. Those judgements can attach your salary. They last 10 years, and can be renewed perpetually forever, at 10 percent. Ten percent people. (They should not be 10 percent. I'm in CA.)
It's too bad our civil court system can be so unethically gaguged by money.
I'm thinking about doing my own Chapter 7, and it's been scaring me for years now. I'm so broke I could probally ride it out, but I want that judgment off me. It has really affected my life in a bad way.
I'm taking notes
Once you (Radon) did that, it is quite unlikely you would be able to go back. It would be perceived as an admission of the validity of their claims, at least to some extent; and more importantly, they will get it in their heads that, using threats, they can keep your project offline.
You then proceeded to apologize and recognize you may have hurt repl.it. That's another step of agreeing with their claim.
So, by the time you ask us
> "Is Replit right?"
The answer is basically - it's right enough for you to have semi-admitted they're right and acted accordingly. So, yeah, case closed basically.
Also, in your post you make all sorts "but what I did is harmless" arguments, which really aren't helping you - at least legally. If you're infringing on their legal IP rights, then it doesn't matter all that much that it's for a non-commercial purpose, or that you're not stealing their clients. Those are arguments for the part of the trial where the judge decides how much damages from you to award repl.it.
> Why would Replit do this?
Because it's a commercial company and it has reason to believe your activity will hurt their income, profits, or chances for survival.
> However, Replit’s actions in this case reveal hypocrisy
Commercial companies are almost necessarily hypocritical, since on the one hand, their interest is, and must be, the furthering of their owners' interests (so typically maximization of profits); but in this interest, it is useful for them to maintain an image of social responsibility, enlightenment, support of the furthering of technology etc. In some industries a company should also appear to be liberal, pro-LGBTQ, anti-racist and so on (especially if it has shady deals with the military-industrial complex, or foreign repressive governments etc).
So, yeah, sure, they're hypocrites, but you must have been living under a rock to believe that they may _not_ by hypocritical.
-----------
Bottom line: If you thought you didn't violate your contractual and legal obligations to them; and that your project wasn't an illegitimate clone, you should have stood your ground, kept the project up, and stated as much.
You could then have told them that:
1. They would probably, or certainly, lose the litigation because they're wrong on the merits.
2. If they want to run a lawsuit with a bunch of expensive lawyers, they would waste a lot of their investment money on that, and you doubt their investors would appreciate it.
3. If they sued you, you make the whole thing very public - as you are obviously capable of doing - and the PR damage would be higher than whatever they hope to gain with their lawsuit against a zero-income zero-clients hobbyist project.
[IANAL] while not a trade secret, isn't it a straight admission of IP reuse without explicit permission (until of course Replit published that stuff under GPL or the likes)
If you have just interned at a company, don't immediately go working on a similar thing and just saying "hey here it is". It will at best sound like sour grapes or looking like a "show off". At best.
I understand, lack of experience and an eagerness to build leads to those situations. The answer from Replit was unnecessary.
> Replit’s core value proposition isn’t letting you run code online (you can do this in dozens of places for free), it’s the features they offer on top of running code. Riju categorically lacked all of these features, including: having a user account, saving your work, sharing your work, publishing webapps, persistent workspaces, discussion forums, integration with GitHub, etc. etc.
> Replit makes a webapp you can use to run code online in different programming languages. This is nothing new (just Google “run python online” for proof), so Replit’s value proposition is extra features like sharing your work, installing third-party packages, and hosting webapps.
The core value proposition of Riju (toy playground for hundres of esoteric languages) != the core value proposition of Replit (feature-rich online IDE environment with lots of integrations and additional support). The only thing they have in common is that you can run code online, and that's not an even close to an original idea by Replit in any way. The CEO making a claim that this project is "copying" Replit has no actual basis given that there are literally dozens of other "copies" out there that are closer to Replit than Riju ever is/was.
I also have no idea how you can argue Riju is "very similar" to Replit, given how generic the technical common ground between them is. I also have no idea how you can argue it's a "tool" and not a toy, the author even explicitly said there was no practical purpose and served as an esoteric quarantine hobby project:
> You might ask: Why did I spend so much time adding obscure programming languages to a webapp nobody was going to use? Well, let me put it this way: Is it the weirdest 2020 hobby you’ve seen? ... Riju is entirely non-commercial. Unlike Replit, I didn’t seek funding from any source—advertising, donations, fundraising, subscriptions, whatever. I have no interest in running a business, and never really wanted Riju to become too popular, since I was the one paying the server bill.
If you intern at my company and then build a very similar product, I will be concerned.
CEO keeps in touch with beast mode 10x'er intern who both impressed him and needed to be kept at arms length.
Beast mode intern flirts with the idea of launching a competing startup under the guise of innocent open source project and transparency with a passing mention of project in email.
CEO realizes he needs to shut intern down otherwise any communication that looks supportive might be used against him later on.
Intern realizes the jig is up. Writes apology to CEO out of fear and discomfort.
CEO responds that he doesn't want anything further to do with him.
Beast mode intern exercises final option to write a blog post attempting to gain community support.
Something or other like that...
Amjad... is that you?
It's one thing to do this to learn more about software development, it's another to give it a name and a website.
They're really leaning into the "I'm just an intern without commercial intents" narrative, but regardless of their intent, it's still incredibly unethical to create something similar your previous employer's IP and market it independently.
Can you explain why you think it is unethical? Provided no noncompete clauses or other previous agreements were violated.
From the article:
> I’m not a business person. I’m just an open-source dev who likes to build weird things for fun. (If you doubt my track record of building things that don’t make money, just check out the list on my website, and note the conspicuous absence of anything that’s ever made a cent of revenue.)
This doesn't make your interpretation impossible, but it's certainly very unlikely.