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Once you no longer work for the company, all bets are off. Just because you employed someone for a while doesn't mean you retain ownership of the knowledge they learned while working for you.

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.

Even if Repl.it rightly felt it was a breach of their IP, the CEO could have assumed good faith, explained his concerns kindly, and politely requested the project be taken down. The interesting thing is that he seemingly panicked, resorted to legal threats almost immediately, and even stooped to warning the kid that they have deep pockets. It’s like something you’d expect from 90s Microsoft, just more scrappy and trashy. And this is Repl.it, a company where you’d imagine OSS community relations would be a big deal.

I agree the interaction could have gone more smoothly. I also still think Repl.it and Amjad have reasonable viewpoints. I didn't see a panicky or instant legal threat reply from the emails. I saw an email pointing out the copying issue clearly, then a strong and lengthy pushback email from Riju author, and _then_ a reply about lawyers. The "I did nothing wrong" email from Riju author probably seemed benign, but seemed like strong pushback from Amjad.

As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I saw a complete jackass reaction that tarnishes the reputation of repl.it.

Second-hand source here, but I’m pretty sure Riju postdates the author’s internship.

IANAL but if he signed a non-compete maybe this could be a legal issue.

Replit is based in SF, and non-competes aren't enforceable in California.

I'm pretty sure you can't leave a compagny and create a similar project copy pasting the same design / idea that you knew while working in the previous compagny.

That's essentially how Zoom was built. Eric Yuan took everything he learned from supporting WebEx and built a new company and product that does the same thing as WebEx.

https://slidebean.com/blog/startups-zoom-company-story-eric-...

Building a new product and company is totally fine. But copying designs is not. And code of course. With 'know-how' it gets trickier. But Zoom doesn't look like a clone, rather just 'another product'. Possibly better.

Zoom does feel like a better copy of WebEx.

Oh it's been years since I've used WeBex - does it have the same layout and button placements as Zoom?

If any of the following are true, you can:

- 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...

I'm really curious what makes you so confident about this.

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.

You must be upset to learn about how Jet.com got founded or Zoom/

You cannot copy the actual source code.

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.

Maybe in idealistic world but almost every successful tech company is a blatant "stealing of ideas", thinking otherwise is naive snd won't bring you far.

All YC companies are legally based in Delaware. Though if the work is done in California, I do not know if the Delaware laws are enforceable, even if the case is settled in Delaware.

Employment contracts with employees based in California are executed under California law. Companies have indeed tried to force employees into contracts that specify Delaware as the applicable law but thankfully Delaware courts have thrown these clauses out as invalid.

Interesting, thanks!

I think there might have been a misunderstanding on your point. From what I read, Riju was wholly created after the intern left Repl.it

Yeah in general this strikes me as a learning lesson. If you're at all career-wise (and/or have signed a contract recently), this area is usually anywhere from an ethically gray area, to a contractural third rail.

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.

How exactly it's existential if a single intern could copy their product? Imagine Microsoft/GitHub or someone with deep pockets going after them?

My point is the view of the world for the two parties here is totally different (unless you are a founder on the edge of success without enough funding on the line to lose your mind at an intern, and if so - interested on your take).

Not empathizing with the founder other than noting it would be sort of predicable for the founder to react like this. IP is big

"Prior invention" He created Riju AFTER working as an intern at Repl.it. From the article:

> 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.

I'm not thinking so much about non compete, I'm thinking about copyright violation or trade secrets (even though it's not the most stunning tech here). I specifically see this commit message:

> 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.

That read very tongue in cheek to me. It'd be akin to creating a microblogging platform in a weekend without any production-ready engineering, yet claiming superiority over Twitter on a commit bumping the post limit to 560 characters.

And then having Twitter threatening to sue.

Exactly, there might be one little feature that surpasses another project and then claim you are better. This is always a tongue in cheap moment and a time to bask in the glory of ones leet skills.

It is explained

Of course its in bad taste/unethical to build any open source clone of a product for a company you used to work for. Doesnt matter how shitty the CEO behaves, how unoriginal the idea you copied is.

Incredible that had to scroll so far down HN to find this comment.

I'm personally surprised at the responses too. I think it's easy to default to "the little open source player is getting screwed over by the big bad corporate entity." In this case I think it's a learning opportunity for the author of the clone.

Say you interned for Twitter for a while - and you decided to create a small open-source self-hosted microblogging site for you to play around with.

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.

Did you not get the part about him being an intern.

Everything you write would apply for someone on vp level with opportunities and stock option.

Get down from there.

What do stock options have to do with anything? The engineers (interns or not) working on the code base are more capable of copying the product that a VP who can't write software. A VP would be capable of stealing employees, connections, or clients from the company, which (at least compared to this case) would be much more damaging, sure, but that's just a strawman you created to detract from OP's argument, which is that the ethics of trying to open source a similar project to your old employers product is morally ambiguous at best.

What does copying the code base have at all to do with this situation? Who are now creating a straw man argument?

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!

> the ethics of trying to open source a similar project to your old employers product is morally ambiguous at best

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

Non-competes in California are non-enforceable with the exception of certain stock-holding company executives.

The only thing morally ambiguous here is the idea that a previous employer gets to somehow own everything you learned while in their employ in perpetuity and can decide whether you are allowed to try to make a living or not.

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.