Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jongjong | Hacker News Reader

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This is deceptive as his specific role at Replit had nothing to do with his later open source work. Also, Replit is not innovative as there exist many similar solutions. How can you be accused to copying someone's work if that work is itself a copy of other existing work?

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.

> 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.

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

What IP was stolen. If neither you nor the CEO can specify there is none.

> As I said the legality of this is not so simple to answer … but once you bring IP into this it becomes a lot more complicated, calculus is also about ideas,

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.

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