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Comment by rurabe | Hacker News Reader

pretty weird/low class move to build a free clone of the product you just worked on.

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.

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Is it really "petty" if you are receiving dubious legal threats from a large corporation? Even if one is confident that they haven't, say, infringed IP, legal fees can be crippling.

It seems worse to keep quiet if you are being bullied by a well-known and respected person/entity more powerful than you.

yeah patent trolls and frivolous lawsuits are definitely a problem, but this doesn't really smell the same.

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.

Maybe he wants to stand up to Replit/Amjad, and he realizes that if he doesn't make a scene and garner public support then he has no chance. That wouldn't mean that he's just in it for the publicity.

How else do you protect yourself against an entity with much more power and money than you?

overbroad patent trolls: yeah i agree

this case: build literally anything else except for the thing that he paid you to learn how it works.

Why should he have to do that?

i mean you're right, he doesn't have to. but i'm pointing out that he's not being personally persecuted for no reason. doing literally anything else than open sourcing his employer's tech stack makes the whole concern about needing protection pretty unnecessary.

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.

I guess I see what you mean. I am more concerned with creating an equivalence when I see Replit's response as being much worse.

Why? If the contract didn't specify that he can't do it (or if it did but cannot be enforced in court) then he is free to do what he wants.

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.

> i would be pretty irritated if someone ripped off my idea after working with me

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.

dude literally emailed the ceo and was like yeah i used this component, but what else could i have used, and yeah i used this other thing i learned about from working there but its popular! and i used yet another thing but you guys werent using it when i worked there.

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.

> similarly petty decision to spend hours documenting everything to post on HN and start throwing mud in public.

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.

agree the ceo was pretty arrogant but you can still be petty if someone is asking for it.

> similarly petty decision to spend hours documenting everything to post on HN and start throwing mud in public.

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.

> pretty weird/low class move to build a free clone of the product you just worked on

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.

i mean thats actually fine, i think it's the copying + victimization thats irking me

If you're an expert in X, you're gonna be building several Xs in your career. That's how the economy works. An employer suing you for building another X is ridiculous. If you're not funded for legal defense, your best way forward is going public. He did everything right.

Even if we agree there's symmetry in behavior (which is a big 'if'), one of the actors is an intern and the second one has millions in funding. The latter has thus much more potential to do harm.

yeah i mean same argument about why they shot harambe because some kid wanted to climb the fence into the gorilla exhibit.

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.

It's not a great look, but it does demonstrate excitement about the domain.

Though there’s always that thought that a situation like this undoubtedly makes for a fantastic viral marketing campaign…

i mean he doesn't seem like he's gonna launch this as a startup so cynically why else would he go to all the trouble?

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