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.
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.
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.
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.