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Comment by dimgl | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, not sure about this one chief. I don't know the legal aspects here, but I think it makes sense to not create an open-source project that competes with your previous employer and then correspond with them letting them know you did it...

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Is this not what the CEO of repl.it did, moving from codeacademy to repl.it?

I don't know about what the CEO of repl.it did. It shouldn't matter. I only know what the author has chosen to publish on his blog post.

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 shouldn't matter.

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.

>I don't know about what the CEO of repl.it did. It shouldn't matter.

Calling out hypocrisy absolutely matters. It matters a lot.

In this case, it also provides a very important precedent.

I think that Repl.it can pound sand unless they've got an enforceable non-compete in their intern contract, and that the CEO seems a little unhinged, but it does seem unwise to e-mail them unprompted with this kind of project. Falls under the same general category as "don't talk to the cops".

IANAL, but as someone who has used both tio.run and repl.it, I have difficulty seeing what sort of “competition” this constitutes (Riju, in my eyes, being very very similar to tio).

Otherwise I would expect tio to have received some threatening emails as well (maybe they have?).

I think the issue was that he was a previous employee. Normally I'd say "yeah, no problem, make a competitor" but he's been exposed to the internal workings of the company.

He should probably stop working with computers altogether going forward as they are a company who uses computers after all.

I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of people are hired because of experience they have doing similar things at prior companies.

Once you leave? Don't really think they can do much as long as you aren't using trade secrets.

Wouldn’t this only hold if you signed a competition clause, and if so then they would have to compensate you for not being able to work on technology X for Y amount of years?

Yeah this is what I'm unsure of as it steps into the legal side of things.

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.

There’s no reasonable expectation of there being trade secrets in the repl.it source code. Trade secrets are narrowly defined and there’s mountains of case law to shed light on the specifics. If they stole a super-secret algorithm not published anywhere else or stole a list of paying customers, now that would be a problem. But any handwavy non-specific speculation is so wild as to be FUD.

Create a competitor? Maybe you should give the article a read, mkay?

this is not reddit

I'm not sure I follow. How is this a Reddit comment?

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?

are you suggesting that publishing evidence against you is a bad idea on reddit but not a bad idea here? Or is your gripe that he said "chief"? That seems like focusing on the wrong thing entirely.

This person's project competes with Repl.it in the same way someone doing Nand2Tetris competes with Intel (a bit exaggerated, but the point is there).

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