Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project (2021)
intuitiveexplanations.com
intuitiveexplanations.com
Last time on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 (4022 points!!!)
Not clear from your reply whether you added it (as a mod) or you are announcing to the gp that the year has since been added as at the time of your comment (i.e. by the poster or a mod).
Yes
> as a mod
I consider adding a year to a post to be more of a janitorial service than moderation, similarly how some users can flag comments. But of course you can call it whatever you'd like
In a way, that makes you a mod even if you don't agree with the moniker.
I can't find the specific dang comment out of the zillions but you can just email hn@ycombinator.com if you are lusting after the power to fix the years in titles.
I don’t care about Replit. But this just seems like a bad idea.
The fact that CEO is a (insert bad word) is also true, however.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/04/...
If you remove the irrelevant details it can be shortened to A personal created what could be construed as a replit competitor this seemed like a bad idea which only makes sense if it's a bar owned by the mafia.
Furthermore they didn't respond "with a heavy hand" This statement carries the implication that some reaction was warranted and they overdid it.
A manipulative sociopath reacted to a non-issue by using insane threats to silence someone on the off chance that he might become a legitimate competitor.
Did you catch the part where he made it about him him growing up a "struggling kid from Jordan" whist still essentially asserting most of the same position.
https://intuitiveexplanations.com/assets/amjad-hn-1.png
This is basically a narcissist simulating a normal person territory.
It's basically saying sorry you made the projected economic cost of my bad behavior negative I'm going to save face here.
Should it be that way? The answer is a definitive maybe. Part of the reason why the legal system exists is to resolve disputes like this. The real problem is the cost and time involved make it mean that both parties rarely have equal access to it, and that it is often used as a heavy handed threat by those who know they have better access to it (with the end result being to silence people rather than seek a just resolution).
As for the personalities of the parties involved, that has nothing to do with it. You can be the biggest jerk in the world and be right, or the kindest person in the world and be wrong.
It's not a dice roll to find out if you are infringing on IP. If you are aren't infringing you can discourage a lot of bullshit by simply ignoring their strongly worded letter. It costs 30 seconds to send an email but your lawyer needs something real to work with.
I hope that every potential customer will consider the culture he cultivates. We don't need this in tech.
Like it. More people should do this
Of the 12 wireline ISPs here, 2 support IPv6. One of the two is available to 2% of the customers; the other costs 50% more than IPv4-only. For the extra money you get 5% of the upload + much higher latency. I'm looking into starting my own ASN just to get IPv6 here.
In the US there are millions of locations stuck with IPv4 only networks due to ISPs that are solidly committed to never supporting it.
IPv6 evangelists don't give a meaningful crap about those millions - and are happy to push IPv6 rosiness in a way that denies their existence.
Because of this, IPv6-only services can only ever get so far off the ground. An exciting service is less exciting when it's unreachable from point B.
It's really not a big deal.
This is a big deal, for just getting access to ipv6.
The latter is much more comprehensive and identifiable.
This isn't to throw shade at HE; I don't recall any complaints about their integrity. It's just to say HE's tunnel is in a practical position to monitor, should they choose or be compelled.
You'll see that the IPs on the pathway are owned by companies that are neither you nor the guy you're accessing. Yes, but you shouldn't add another one you didn't know (e.g. free vpn).
I guess maybe I should expect this sort of militant behaviour from the sort of ppl who run a chunk of the internet backbone?
EDIT: realized x@googlemail.com should work[1]
With my own ASN, I have a shot at peering with my ISPs IX.
Many years ago, I taught lots of programming workshops in academia and managing the student environments was always a pain. So when I heard of replit and similar tools it always seemed to me like a good solution for this problem.
However, I was struck recently when I went back to teaching how little in roads it made in this space, out of 4 universities in the UK (cohorts of 100s) I saw hardly anyone using it or even heard of it.
It seems the preferred option now is to just use google colab, which works great but doesn't give students the feel of a full-blown IDE.
As a top dog CEO you may think that. But it is incredible stupid, arrogant, and immature to put that in writing when dealing with one of the little people.
Thanks but no thanks, my idea of work is not pursuing relentless work to help with somebody else's ego
I’m in a small minority on this site I’m sure but professionalism is important and this screams immaturity.
Using knowledge that you have to create a competing product is professionalism, using Legal threats to eliminate competitors - is not.
The core questions are IP rights and non-compete. What agreement did the employee enter into concerning these, and to what extent is this project relevant. Excerpts and matters of fact.
The rest is childish noise.
If that is true, that author should have just ignored it.
And I see personal attacks on the CEO here in some comments that refer to his opinions about the most divisive topic on HN nowadays.
No one should be patronizing a company like this.
Google used to give universities unlimited storage but even with their billions they pulled the plug and left universities in a difficult situation (so did MS later).
Then again, as the company, if I felt a former intern could threaten my business like that, I'd ask serious questions about my value proposition and moat (which could be premium features, sales, or an attractive/viral free tier - not too familiar with what they do). On a personal level, I can see how it could feel unfair, but the idea does not seem that original.
What the intern did is absolutely fine in my book.
I think the guy is obviously young, and a bit naive . And really shouldn’t have gone to social media.
And the CEO handled it poorly
Though as someone else said, if your moat is so shallow someone can copy it in a weekend…. Power to him.
Really i wish we could all just work together on great things
I try to stay out of the drama
There's no logic to that.
> Really i wish we could all just work together on great things
Indeed, but for that to happen you need to be open-source since day 1, and not work for profit. And even then you get ego issues, which this CEO apparently has.
We'd need capitalism 2.0 because the current version just sets incentives to not make you work somewhat harmoniously together.
It’s common sense - he did behave in an unethical way.
To wit, stealing trade secrets is recognized as an actual crime, and got someone 8 years of jail for trying to sell the formula for Coca-cola to Pepsi.
When I work for a company, I don't spin-off that company using corporate knowledge, I just find something else to do (and that's probably why I'm not rich :D), but it's the most elegant thing to do.
Zuckerberg is a famous example of such behaviour.
I think this Radon is talented too (good tech + doesn't wait for others to give permission + very interesting ideas), and what he did is probably okay-ish, a bit borderline but still on the ok-side (he seems more like a fan of Repl.it than anything).
I just wouldn't go til the point where I complain about it publicly.
That is a very common way to do a spin off. Usually it involves some patents or non public knowledge and you make an agreement with the original company for it. But when it is all open there is nothing, legal or moral (in my opinion), from stopping you from making your own spinoff. Companies don't care about you, you shouldn't care about them.
If everyone followed this rule there would be no Fairchild and no Intel.
And if it's a topic or industry I have expertise and knowledge of, why would I throw that all away just because I worked for a company where I used that expertise and knowledge? That's basically implying that we're all "ethically" subject to non-competes for the rest of our lives after working for a company making a particular kind of product.
That's clearly and absolutely "inelegant", to use your phrasing.
Then they want you to not use the knowledge, skills, and understanding to build a product when you aren't working for them.
This is hypocritical and self-contradictory. They require you to do the very thing they don't want you to do, just as long as it's in their favor.
Employers do what they think they can get away with to extract maximum value from you. If you are smart, you will do what you think you can get away with to extract maximum value from your employer, too. Playing fair when the other side doesn't is just forfeiting.
If the intern was under a no-compete, or stole any IP, this would be known and there would be nothing to talk about.
"you can't just walk to Mordor" - I guess the "cant" is to refer to the grave consequences. (orcs with blades are dangerous)
I mean I couldn't for the first year after working there because I had signed a contract saying I wouldn't which is what most people do, is that what you mean? That if you sign a non-compete agreement you can't? Because ok, but I would think if you don't sign the non-compete agreement it means you can because otherwise why would people have non-compete agreements?
If it's a huge company (e.g. you work for a large telecom company and launch a new telecom company), then it's fine because you started only from one brick, and had to figure out most of the pieces by yourself.
No reasons to be surprised if private army A colleagues don't like your move.
That guy didn't get bullied by the CEO, the CEO got bullied by HackerNews.
A logical conclusion is that the breach doesn't exist and arguments that rest on it are unfounded
This seems somewhat unethical, and whether it is legal or not that is up to lawyers and specialized people of law to decide, and the founder wanted those people to get involved to decide that, again nothing crazy to expect after you create a copy of a project you were paid (or at least trained) to work on and learn all about it.
Moreover, quote from his article:
> I worked for Replit in Summer 2019, where I was asked to rebuild Replit’s package management stack
What does a package management stack have to do with an open source IDE?
If someone interned as a doctor's assistant at a medical center and then later started their own medical center. Can their previous employer sue them for that? It's nonsense. There is nothing innovative or exclusive about launching a medical center. Just like there is nothing innovative or exclusive about launching an IDE. It's old tech that has been implemented 1000 times. The author is the only one who innovated on the concept by making it open source.
If Replit can sue this guy, then Cloud9 can sue Replit, WebStorm can sue Cloud9, Microsoft can sue WebStorm, etc, etc... Who even invented the first IDE?
Replit was deceptive. They know they are in the wrong and used malicious, unfounded legal threats to scare him into doing what they wanted.
As I said the legality of this is not so simple to answer, yes you can intern as a doctor at one place and then open a similar one, and if someone tries file a suit about this then I think it will be very hard to find a sympathetic judge to look into it, but once you bring IP into this it becomes a lot more complicated, calculus is also about ideas, yet it didn't stop Leibniz or Newton from making accusations of plagiarizing.
>If Replit can sue this guy, then Cloud9 can sue Replit, WebStorm can sue Cloud9, Microsoft can sue WebStorm, etc, etc... Who even invented the first IDE?
the difference here is that the guy worked/interned at replit, this what moves it for me from the founder being an asshole to a grey area where he sees someone had access to all resources at the company and now wants to use that knowledge(or at least having access to it) to create an alternative and he decides to go with a heavy handed approach before it becomes a big headache, was he nice in how he went about it? no
From a legal perspective, there is no such thing as “IP”. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. If you want to talk about legalities, you have to start by saying which of those four were violated. “Ideas” alone have no legal protections.
Not only was the CEO being a bully but he was wrong. There is no ethical dilemma here. It happens every day. You are allowed to copy an idea for software. Not the literal code. If he wrote it all himself this should be a non-issue. I also urge you to look at how the CEO “apologized”. I will never use their service for that alone.
Does it still seem unethical if the proposition is inverted? What if a company figures out they no longer need your skills and/or labour. Is it unethical for them to lay you off? What if they actually had to do some work behind your back in order to figure out how to do this?
What do you think about a company that offers people a home for their digital creativity, and then uses that creativity to build technology that makes the skills and network their "users" have acquired over their lives worthless.
You'd expect the users to adapt to the situation, find new skills and get on with their lives right? Which is exactly what replit should do instead of sueing. Apparently they are well funded now so it should be a problem.