[HN Gopher] Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source pro...
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Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
Author : raxod502
Score : 2585 points
Date : 2021-06-07 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (intuitiveexplanations.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (intuitiveexplanations.com)
| debacle wrote:
| The only question that matters is "Did you sign something saying
| you agreed not to name something like this when you interned for
| Repl.it, and is it enforceable in your jurisdiction?"
|
| I think this makes Amjad look a bit like an ass, but I don't know
| him personally or your relationship with him or repl.it
| strbean wrote:
| Seems like both Radon and Repl.it are based in California. If
| that is correct, then non-compete agreements are only
| enforceable for founders/partners in a business.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Naturally, I took down my project right away, gave it some time
| for feelings to cool, and sent Replit an apology.
|
| Once you (Radon) did that, it is quite unlikely you would be able
| to go back. It would be perceived as an admission of the validity
| of their claims, at least to some extent; and more importantly,
| they will get it in their heads that, using threats, they can
| keep your project offline.
|
| You then proceeded to apologize and recognize you may have hurt
| repl.it. That's another step of agreeing with their claim.
|
| So, by the time you ask us
|
| > "Is Replit right?"
|
| The answer is basically - it's right enough for you to have semi-
| admitted they're right and acted accordingly. So, yeah, case
| closed basically.
|
| Also, in your post you make all sorts "but what I did is
| harmless" arguments, which really aren't helping you - at least
| legally. If you're infringing on their legal IP rights, then it
| doesn't matter all that much that it's for a non-commercial
| purpose, or that you're not stealing their clients. Those are
| arguments for the part of the trial where the judge decides how
| much damages from you to award repl.it.
|
| > Why would Replit do this?
|
| Because it's a commercial company and it has reason to believe
| your activity will hurt their income, profits, or chances for
| survival.
|
| > However, Replit's actions in this case reveal hypocrisy
|
| Commercial companies are almost necessarily hypocritical, since
| on the one hand, their interest is, and must be, the furthering
| of their owners' interests (so typically maximization of
| profits); but in this interest, it is useful for them to maintain
| an image of social responsibility, enlightenment, support of the
| furthering of technology etc. In some industries a company should
| also appear to be liberal, pro-LGBTQ, anti-racist and so on
| (especially if it has shady deals with the military-industrial
| complex, or foreign repressive governments etc).
|
| So, yeah, sure, they're hypocrites, but you must have been living
| under a rock to believe that they may _not_ by hypocritical.
|
| -----------
|
| Bottom line: If you thought you didn't violate your contractual
| and legal obligations to them; and that your project wasn't an
| illegitimate clone, you should have stood your ground, kept the
| project up, and stated as much.
|
| You could then have told them that:
|
| 1. They would probably, or certainly, lose the litigation because
| they're wrong on the merits.
|
| 2. If they want to run a lawsuit with a bunch of expensive
| lawyers, they would waste a lot of their investment money on
| that, and you doubt their investors would appreciate it.
|
| 3. If they sued you, you make the whole thing very public - as
| you are obviously capable of doing - and the PR damage would be
| higher than whatever they hope to gain with their lawsuit against
| a zero-income zero-clients hobbyist project.
| [deleted]
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Situation sounds like to me is:
|
| CEO keeps in touch with beast mode 10x'er intern who both
| impressed him and needed to be kept at arms length.
|
| Beast mode intern flirts with the idea of launching a competing
| startup under the guise of innocent open source project and
| transparency with a passing mention of project in email.
|
| CEO realizes he needs to shut intern down otherwise any
| communication that looks supportive might be used against him
| later on.
|
| Intern realizes the jig is up. Writes apology to CEO out of fear
| and discomfort.
|
| CEO responds that he doesn't want anything further to do with
| him.
|
| Beast mode intern exercises final option to write a blog post
| attempting to gain community support.
|
| Something or other like that...
| mitchill wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| It's one thing to do this to learn more about software
| development, it's another to give it a name and a website.
|
| They're really leaning into the "I'm just an intern without
| commercial intents" narrative, but regardless of their intent,
| it's still incredibly unethical to create something similar
| your previous employer's IP and market it independently.
| eulenteufel wrote:
| >incredibly unethical to create something similar your
| previous employer's IP and market it independently.
|
| Can you explain why you think it is unethical? Provided no
| noncompete clauses or other previous agreements were
| violated.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Then why would OP tell them about that? Sounds to me like the
| latest thing you'd do
| mitchill wrote:
| Likely OP didn't think it was unethical, which is why they
| shared, but that doesn't change the fact that it was.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Except nothing in the OP's work or correspondence suggests any
| competitive aspirations, so unless other information comes to
| light, this summary is a fantasy.
| whymauri wrote:
| Regardless of whether it's true, one has to admit it sounds
| like a sideplot from Halt and Catch Fire, lol.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Of course it doesn't.
| kbelder wrote:
| The lack of evidence is a clear indication!
| wernercd wrote:
| > Beast mode intern flirts with the idea of launching a
| competing startup under the guise of innocent open source
| project and transparency with mention in email.
|
| Amjad... is that you?
| samatman wrote:
| Yep, that's the first thing I do when I'm running off with my
| former company's IP to launch a competitor: send an email to my
| erstwhile CEO with a link and ask him "so what do you think?"
| clevergadget wrote:
| I shouldn't have had to scroll so far to read this
| vickychijwani wrote:
| > Beast mode intern flirts with the idea of launching a
| competing startup under the guise of innocent open source
| project
|
| From the article:
|
| > I'm not a business person. I'm just an open-source dev who
| likes to build weird things for fun. (If you doubt my track
| record of building things that don't make money, just check out
| the list on my website, and note the conspicuous absence of
| anything that's ever made a cent of revenue.)
|
| This doesn't make your interpretation impossible, but it's
| certainly very unlikely.
| edumucelli wrote:
| I think this will be a "streisand effect" at its best.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| The messages by the CEO are somewhat unprofessional and very
| untactful. However, I think that they're well within their right
| to demand this be taken down. Perhaps, since you explicitly
| brought it to the attention of the CEO directly, they must demand
| that you take it down, or risk losing the ability to litigate
| against other more egregious examples of copycats by ex
| employees. But I'm no lawyer.
| londons_explore wrote:
| If I were the CEO in this position, I would make sure the intern
| had shares/stock options as part of their comp, and my reply
| would be:
|
| "Hi X,. It looks like a very cool project, but I'm slightly
| concerned that it's existence could hurt repl.it. And as
| shareholders, that could hurt both of us.
|
| Let me know if you want a video call to discuss further.
|
| X"
| zemo wrote:
| I seriously doubt he has any equity, he worked there for four
| months; most equity contracts have a one-year cliff.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Well that's a poor move on the CEOs side... Everyone who
| interacts with the company in any form should have some tiny
| amount of equity if legally possible, and some of it should
| be unvested, options, or restricted from sale.
| karmicthreat wrote:
| The Replit CEO seems like a pretty fragile person. They could
| have turned this into an advantage.
| Arjuna144 wrote:
| After reading this I would definitely advise against working with
| the company behind repl.it. This is really poor behavior that
| seems to be motivated by fear and/or jealousy. Nothing of humanly
| high value can be expected of a company with such a shitty CEO
| diogotozzi wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201004004511/https://github.co...
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Forked it: https://github.com/hirako2000/riju
|
| Enjoy.
| zx2391 wrote:
| No offense, but I found the _early_ replit so cool, I will
| replicate it as a weekend project soon.
| ezekg wrote:
| I'm also a big fan of _early_ repl.it. I used to be able to hit
| a bookmarked url and get a repl _right away._ But its been
| getting slower and slower and more complicated lately, and this
| whole situation left a bad taste in my mouth, and it 's
| probably the push I need to move to an alternative.
|
| In case anybody is thinking of building -- I'd happily pay for
| a similar app that let's you write/share private repls, with
| third-party package support (yarn, pip, nuget, maven, etc.)
| jascii wrote:
| Looks like Amjad doubled down on this:
| https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| New CEOs: Don't talk so much. If you have to talk to someone
| outside your company, and it's not part of a business strategy,
| public relations, or other normal part of your job, and it seems
| important, do it through a lawyer. Not only is it scarier, the
| lawyer can tell you (in a nice way) to shut up.
| Shicholas wrote:
| Unpopular opinion, IAAL and frankly Replit has a case that will
| pass the "motion to dismiss" stage when litigation starts getting
| expensive b/c of discovery. The OP worked for Replit and
| therefore had access to private source code or "trade secrets"
| before creating his project. It'd take expert testimony for the
| OP to prove in court that his OSS project was not influenced in
| any way by Replit's closed-source code, which imo is unlikely.
| plank_time wrote:
| lol you don't know what you're talking about in the least
| Shicholas wrote:
| even if I don't know what I'm talking about in the least, a
| judge would still have to assume everything in a pleading is
| true and imo Repl.it would have done enough to get there w/
| trade secret allegations had OP not taken the OSS down.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Do you?
|
| Please, offer something material as a contibution instead of
| making fun of other people.
|
| My understanding that it this will probably pass a lawyers
| sniff test and expert testimony means that developers have to
| testify that the codebases are different.
| dilawar wrote:
| I just deleted my repl account. I rarely used it. I am not their
| paying customer so not sure if it counts but it is a small token
| of soliditary.
|
| Reading those emails from the CEO left a bad taste in mouth.
| rwmj wrote:
| How did Replit manage to raise $20m for something as trivial as
| "a webapp you can use to run code online in different programming
| languages"? I assume that it's something a bit more than that?
| cmsj wrote:
| I guess the cynical answer would be: because there is so much
| VC money out there, you can probably get funding for just about
| anything.
|
| I'm off to work on a pitch deck for coding bootcamps for cats.
| [deleted]
| cycomanic wrote:
| Those who are defending repl.it behaviour, did you notice that
| the guy interned with them in summer 2019? I mean even many NDAs
| or non-competes (leaving legality aside) would have expired after
| two years. I mean what secrets that are still relevant after 2
| years could an intern taken away? If you have secrets like that
| would you let an intern anywhere close to them?
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| Putting your foot down and being comfortable delivering
| aggression and threats does not make you a good CEO or even
| leader. I often see CEO's demand unwavering respect and loyalty
| when they do little to return it and are highly unreasonable.
| Some people expect this image and demands from a CEO, but often I
| think it just leads to poor leadership. Steve Jobs is often
| quoted as being an effective asshole. That doesn't mean he
| couldn't have been better and more cordial. You can often get the
| reactions, loyalty, and respect you want from other methods. Very
| juvenile, is my take.
| fredgrott wrote:
| Some points:
|
| 1. I am not lawyer but:
|
| Is threatening someone with legal action illegal? Yes, if the
| intent is to resolve a good-faith dispute without litigation. But
| the threat of legal action without the intention of taking it may
| constitute extortion. Note that the person making the settlement
| request does not need to be right that the claim is winnable. But
| it must be made in good faith.Feb 24, 2020
|
| OP needs to spend some coffee money and ask questions of a local
| attorney.
| albedoa wrote:
| No, the threat of legal action is not extortion regardless of
| the intention behind it. I see your disclaimer, but you went on
| to repeat a common misconception.
|
| It can be extortion to threaten to involve the police if
| demands are not met, but this is not that.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| There is a world of prior art before replit, there is absolutely
| nothing they can patent or bully you about.
|
| Do not apologize, that is an admission of guilt. Also, do not
| talk to that guy, you are making it worse.
|
| The guy's objective is to kill replit competitors, which is
| itself a monopolistic practice which is probably illegal.
|
| By the way, the guy sounds like a fucking jerk, I am closing my
| replit account. Good luck with your open source project.
| rurban wrote:
| If you got litigatious companies threatening you, the simpliest
| is to turn it into an official GNU project, and assign the
| copyright to the FSF. They'll happily fight the bastards.
| abriosi wrote:
| What an unfortunate set of events.
|
| I think both parties communicated badly with each other. It is
| easy to try to look at this in a binary fashion. In reality the
| situation is very complex and prone to misinterpretation.
|
| There are no excuses for childish behaviour though
| 015a wrote:
| Since Amjad has so much to say about ethics, quick pulse-check,
| lets rank these in terms of their ethical foundations: building a
| love-letter open-source hobbyist alternative to a large
| application; shutting down this alternative with potentially
| unfounded legal threats; making millions of dollars standing on
| the shoulders of giants by effectively repackaging and selling
| hosted open source software.
| trhway wrote:
| >Every similarity between my project and Replit can be explained
| by looking only at GitHub repositories and blog posts that were
| published online by Replit itself, making them obviously not any
| kind of secret.
|
| [IANAL] while not a trade secret, isn't it a straight admission
| of IP reuse without explicit permission (until of course Replit
| published that stuff under GPL or the likes)
| CRConrad wrote:
| Do people often put up source code that _isn 't_ under some
| kind of FOSS license onto GitHub?
| mousepilot wrote:
| That company sucks but I predict they would win in court, simply
| because you made something that resembles their work, and thats
| plenty to convince a jury or the average judge.
|
| Sure, it sounds like a generic enough page, and there are plenty
| like it, but how many have been put up by an intern at a company
| that ALSO put one up.
|
| Additionally, you'll probably win here at HN, but in all
| probability you will not get a HN reader as either a judge or a
| jury.
|
| Might be an unpopular opinion but its mine!
| alephu5 wrote:
| Is this illegal? In Europe it is part of the business landscape
| for groups of employees to break off and form competing
| companies.
| mousepilot wrote:
| In the USA its part of the business landscape to get sued.
| superasn wrote:
| This repo is probably going to become the next youtube-dl on
| Github.
| Tade0 wrote:
| A healthy, competitive reponse to a single former intern one-
| upping you would be something among the lines of "ok, kid see if
| you can replicate _THIS_ ".
|
| Also a healthy response would be to issue a C&D - assuming they
| have a case here.
|
| But this? We don't have all the details and Replit might well be
| in the right here, but still - that's not how you handle such
| cases.
|
| And I should know, because I've been in trouble regarding my
| comments on HN with a company I used to work for, but the
| communication on their side was firm, polite and professional.
| fleddr wrote:
| I naturally sympathize with underdogs and this seems a classic
| case of bullying and power abuse.
|
| That said, this trend where such disputes are made public
| including personal details continues to shock me. It must be my
| European perspective.
|
| In particular, just screen grabbing personal conversations and
| publishing them to the world without permission, with the
| person's full name, and then adding accusations...I find
| appalling.
|
| You may believe it to be quite alright if the person in question
| is only evil enough, yet I still object even in that case. It
| breaks the basic expectation of private communication. It smears
| the person publicly, whom may see his online reputation
| significantly damaged, possibly forever.
|
| It's impossible to defend yourself against public smearing, as
| the more you try to counter it, the more attention you give to
| the original issue, only further increasing damage.
|
| I must be old school to believe that private communication is to
| remain private.
|
| Furthermore, the victim (whom I fully believe to be a victim)
| just showed to the world how easily he doxes work relations,
| which doesn't look great for future employment.
|
| Again, I'm morally on the side of the blogger, but I believe this
| article could have been far less intrusive by leaving out
| specific names of individuals. You'd still get the point across.
|
| The real truth is of course that I'm old. Private communication
| should be treated as a thing of the past. Youngsters don't
| acknowledge this code of honor, and therefore one should treat
| private comms as public.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| extremely unrelated to repl.it: thank you for straight.el !
| tome wrote:
| Yes, this is the only sane way I found of managing packages on
| Emacs. Talented guy!
| celeritascelery wrote:
| I am a huge fan of all of Radon's work!
| kirillzubovsky wrote:
| On one hand, SV is full of sociopathic founders who'd torture you
| for breakfast just for the giggles. On the other, being a founder
| is incredibly hard and very stressful, and when you are stressed
| lines get murky, and you sometimes do things that you wouldn't do
| if you took a moment to rest.
|
| I wouldn't immediately assume bad intentions where bad decisions
| in search for good outcomes were made. To know which one it was,
| one has to first know the people really well, and know them both
| when the times were good and the times were bad.
|
| Someone once told me: "Never assume, you make an ass of you and
| me (ass|u|me)."
| anm89 wrote:
| Double speaky "pity us, we're just the VC funded, expensive
| lawyer having, little guy" response post from the founder
| incoming.
| huntermeyer wrote:
| Repl.it CEO had this to say:
|
| > There is a difference between copying a feature and actually
| getting intro a contract, and access to the code, copying it and
| calling it open-source.
|
| > As a matter of principle, when someone goes into your home and
| steals from you, even if it's not material, you have to respond.
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369
| iameli wrote:
| Well, Amjad, I think there's more than one way of looking at
| it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named
| CodeAcademy and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and
| found out that you had already stolen it.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| For anyone not familiar with the reference, see:
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_.
| ..
|
| Lots of great stories on folklore.org, recommended reading!
| gopiandcode wrote:
| Just another reason not to trust companies that focus too much on
| "open source" rather than free/libre software. The former is just
| a corporate coopting of the latter in order to exploit developers
| and the developer community, as evidenced by the wildly
| regressive views of the repl.it CEO. Insane.
| yumraj wrote:
| This is a good case study in how to not treat someone, especially
| a seemingly talented engineer. CEO's hinting of money raised and
| legal threat is almost comical.
|
| The CEO should have recognized that this is a guy who is
| interested in this space and should have made every effort to
| hire/acquihire him. He may have had to use some of that VC money
| he was going to pay the lawyers but that would have been the
| best.
|
| If I were a VC in this company I would be very concerned by the
| immaturity of the CEO.
|
| EDIT: one more point: Would ReplIt be now the _Copycat_ if they
| add the support for languages that the OP had added but were
| missing from Replit?
| thatoneguytoo wrote:
| If you follow Amjad on Twitter, it's evident that he is
| incredibly petty.
|
| Repl.it is a company with no moat. They are features are
| literally used by dozens (check the number of runs of the repls)
|
| Only companies which are so insecure about tech get into petty
| fights with college interns.
| SquibblesRedux wrote:
| All of what I write here is my opinion based on what I have seen
| referenced in the original post. There could be facts or
| circumstances that I am unaware of that render such opinion ill-
| informed. Please don't sue me or take offense -- I offer only
| insight from quite a bit of life experience.
|
| From the email exchange posted [1], I would say Amjad was right
| in asking that the repository be taken down. Regardless of
| intent, Radon's actions had given the appearance of unethical
| behavior. Bear in mind that, when considering ethics, intent is
| not as important as appearance. While Amjad's statements were not
| necessarily optimal, I would not fault him for what he said.
| There are so many other adversities in life -- we should not make
| ourselves adversaries of one another.
|
| A couple red flags that stood out:
|
| (1) There is an implication that Amjad's time is owed to Radon.
| Radon's meticulous documentation and other content posted on the
| Internet is suggestive of overachievement and perfectionism,
| traits that can be very valuable in many technical domains.
| Unfortunately, personal correspondence usually is not one of
| those domains. One should always be most respectful of other
| people's time. Time is a non-renewable resource of unknown
| quantity.
|
| (2) Some of Radon's statements and expressions, whether they do
| or do not contain truth, are quite adversarial and should be
| avoided in correspondence. Those that stood out to me are "You
| are categorically in the wrong," "... you have no legal or
| ethical basis ...," "... I have acted in good faith ... [and]
| your conduct ... has been grossly rude and unprofessional,"
| "Despite repeated inquiry on my part, you have refused to point
| to any specific feature ...," "... your characterization of the
| morality of my actions is baseless and in bad faith," and "It's a
| shame that you decided to terminate our relationship this way."
| In all things, regardless of the circumstances, the first rule
| should be "Be respectful."
|
| While I can imagine myself in Radon's shoes and empathize with
| what he did and why, experience has taught me that certain norms
| of civility, whether they be shallow or even illogical, are
| expected in discourse. My advise to Radon would be to let the
| whole thing slide. Life will bring so many more unexpected twists
| and turns; save time energy for life's truly important battles
| that are yet to come.
|
| [1] https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2
| [deleted]
| stevebmark wrote:
| Did the author disclose the work on Riju as a prior invention
| before joining Repl.it? If so that puts him in the clear. I would
| also check your hiring contract to see what kind of clauses are
| in there about prior inventions. For larger companies, I don't
| think this company behavior would surprise anyone.
|
| I think I can understand where Repl.it is coming from. All I know
| is this behavior (by Riju author) isn't something I would
| personally want to do. Join a company, leave, and open source
| something that is directly related to the company's business
| model, whether it undermines their profits or not. It's standard
| for companies (other than Apple) to say "work on whatever tech
| you want, but if it competes with us, we should evaluate it
| that's OK."
|
| I would at least have gotten their buy-in on the project or idea
| first. Especially given this commit message:
|
| > repl.it superiority!!
|
| I also wouldn't use intentions or the fact that it currently has
| less traffic than Repl.it as example of why this is harmless. I
| would approach this with an empathetic view to how a company
| would see an engineer leaving and then open sourcing something
| directly related to the company, based on what they learned while
| working at the company.
| aarohmankad wrote:
| 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
| playpause wrote:
| 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.
| stevebmark wrote:
| 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.
| knl wrote:
| As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I saw a
| complete jackass reaction that tarnishes the reputation of
| repl.it.
| wernercd wrote:
| "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.
| stevebmark wrote:
| 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.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| It is explained
| mkishi wrote:
| 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.
| seg_lol wrote:
| 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.
| jjeaff wrote:
| 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.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| 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.
| stevebmark wrote:
| 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.
| dogman144 wrote:
| 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.
| ejboy wrote:
| How exactly it's existential if a single intern could copy
| their product? Imagine Microsoft/GitHub or someone with deep
| pockets going after them?
| abricot wrote:
| 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.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| 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.
| abricot wrote:
| 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!
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| > 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
| jjeaff wrote:
| 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.
| jahewson wrote:
| Non-competes in California are non-enforceable with the
| exception of certain stock-holding company executives.
| cole-k wrote:
| 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.
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| Replit is based in SF, and non-competes aren't enforceable in
| California.
| [deleted]
| Thaxll wrote:
| 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.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| You must be upset to learn about how Jet.com got founded
| or Zoom/
| hathawsh wrote:
| 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-...
| jollybean wrote:
| 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.
| ejboy wrote:
| Zoom does feel like a better copy of WebEx.
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| 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...
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| teraflop wrote:
| 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.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| 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.
| Jhsto wrote:
| 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.
| jahewson wrote:
| 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.
| Jhsto wrote:
| Interesting, thanks!
| TX0098812 wrote:
| Seems odd but keep in mind we've only heard one side and the
| truth always sounds obvious when only one side is heard.
| matthewheath wrote:
| I'm very sad to hear that you were threatened with a lawsuit --
| it's an impressive project. Unclear what jurisdiction you're in
| (probably the US), but in the UK they would have a hard time
| arguing in court that your project damaged them.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Whoever is right here aside, this blog represents to me a common
| challenge IC/engineer/line worker types have understanding how
| the parts of the world, and related conflict resolution, actually
| works.
|
| I think it causes a lot of frustration for them and is present in
| a lot of different industries. In the spirit of pragmatism, this
| is what I think it looks like if you'd like to avoid this pattern
| in your own career management:
|
| - event happens driven by an IC-type
|
| - a conflict happens over the event which exists on the narrative
| plane, where facts are fuzzy and emotions/identities get pulled
| in.
|
| - the IC-type tries to get out of the conflict by listing a
| roster of facts, and sort of miss the boat on understanding that
| narrative conflicts don't really care about those facts.
|
| - IC-types, totally justifiably b/c yeah facts matter when
| sourcing intent, are some version of befuddled or angry or
| whatever, usually try more facts, but nonetheless the conflict
| just stays around
|
| - ultimately, they totally miss "the why" on why the conflict is
| actually happening, and as a result they are usually on the
| losing end of it
|
| This blog is chock full of this approach. What it really reminds
| me of, and why I mention it, is a series of essays posted by a
| well known, long serving, but non-mgmt reporter who was fired
| from a famous paper recently. Same issue. Facts themselves and
| the nuance involved made things look at least understandable, the
| narrative launched for other reasons, and the reporter was fired.
| The reporter issued a series of essays staying in facts-land
| after getting fired, highlighting the facts-driven counter the
| reporter tried while in-house. Despite overwhelming facts, you
| could tell the reporter just wasn't aware of what had actually
| turned against them/what they actually had to address if they
| wanted to stay. He was speaking Language A and the team he had to
| work with was speaking Language Z.
|
| Addressing a narrative isn't bending to it, but you need to
| counter it with something other than/in addition to the facts.
| These narratives can stay a long and have negative impacts much
| longer than you can "be right." Find the language of your
| criticism and make sure you counter in the same language.
| xaceuu wrote:
| I hope the CEO won't threat my Telegram bot projects. It's been
| on the Replit for a while, is there any other platforms that
| provide the same as Replit?
| jfrunyon wrote:
| "Fixed" title: "Replit asked former employee with thorough inside
| knowledge of their operations to take down copycat project which
| he sent directly to the CEO"
|
| It's like y'all have never heard of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design. No, building a
| direct competitor to a business you have previously worked for is
| generally not ethical, and will almost always end up being
| infringing, because even if you're not _trying_ to copy their
| code /design/whatever, you almost certainly will.
|
| By the way, allowing users to run their own code, unsandboxed, on
| your dime, is generally a bad idea. What happens when someone
| uses it to distribute $illegal_material? Or send spam? Or starts
| logging what other people are running?
| NmAmDa wrote:
| The CEO instead of even representing his side in a proper way and
| justify his accusation of source code copying, he instead
| retweeted another random guy tweet complaining that people here
| at HN are shredding him. He seem to consider himself a victim.
|
| https://twitter.com/amasad
|
| I think it is good thing that people start punish these CEOs who
| believe they can do whatever they want and that world revolve
| around their product.
| lynxaegon wrote:
| After reading the whole blog post.. i deleted my account from
| them. This is pure bullying which i don't agree with. I shall
| never use replit again.
| Yoofie wrote:
| Beside the whole legal threat drama, is anyone else surprised
| that replit got $20 million in VC funding for what essentially is
| a script that can be made by an intern in a day? And the idea has
| been around forever and is not even unique.
|
| Is it really that easy to get VC funding for these types of
| things? Like Jesus, if all it takes is some ideas and moving to
| SF to secure funding like this, then I have a whole bunch of
| ideas worth 100's of millions that I would love to sell.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It sounded low, honestly.
| detaro wrote:
| It's not something you do in "essentially a day" if you want it
| be secure and reliable. (E.g. the example toy project they link
| literally just runs python directly on the server:
| https://github.com/raxod502/python-in-a-box/blob/master/serv...
| - you'll need to stop doing that _very_ quickly if public). The
| parts of their stack that repl.it has put on their own Github
| looks loads more valuable (and I assume are also not covering
| some of those core problems)
|
| Which makes the reaction weird.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >Which makes the reaction weird.
|
| Consider that funders and investors like the parent reply
| will say "huh, that's so easy it isn't worth that much money"
| and it won't be that weird.
| detaro wrote:
| With a view that shallow, _tons_ of well-funded tech
| companies are "easy", and get funding and success
| nevertheless.
| mr337 wrote:
| This looks like a company/CEO that loves to benefit from open
| source as long as it benefits them so strongly.
|
| Further more it looks like a CEO that can't innovate and the only
| options is to innovate through litigation. Must be something
| about that VC money burning a hole in their pocket to send
| lawyers vs adding features, marketing, or capturing new users.
| axbytg wrote:
| Amjad is incredibly unprofessional. Years ago I worked in ed-tech
| and one of our sales reps replied to a tweet, from a Replit user
| complaining about some feature on Replit. Amjad damn near bit his
| head off and said some really nasty things to him. My coworker
| was this meek religious dude honestly trying to just send a
| teacher a helpful link. I personally would never work there and
| have steered several great engineers I know away.
|
| Edit: Amjad has been tweeting a ton of stuff along the lines of
| "oh you can be too popular on HN, hivemind bad" so expect to see
| him pull up the blinders and act like the world is crazy if he
| ever sees this. Amjad, you treat people poorly.
| gorbachev wrote:
| "Amjad has been tweeting a ton of stuff along the lines of "oh
| you can be too popular on HN, hivemind bad""
|
| Oh, so one of those "I'm a contrarian, therefore I'm awesome"
| type of people?
| randompwd wrote:
| > religious dude
|
| What has religious got to do with anything? Most terrorism in
| todays world is by religious dudes.
| axbytg wrote:
| I'm sure you can understand the context and I'm sure that the
| point you are insistent on inserting is not novel information
| to any readers of this thread.
| koreanguy wrote:
| CEO is absolutely nuts , upload it back to github and F** Replit
| in the balls
| [deleted]
| gavinray wrote:
| Why did you take it down? And why did you apologize?
|
| I think the threat to sue was posturing, the same way that legal
| charges are always trumped up to get you to accept a plea.
|
| If you had let them see it through, and they intended to sue you,
| you could have churned up a horror-inducing PR nightmare of a
| shitstorm for them.
|
| If someone is really as petty to light cash on fire suing a young
| person with no assets over baseless claims, let them do it.
|
| Litigation is expensive, you could have qualified for a public
| defender while they burned company assets, or just have
| represented yourself.
|
| I say this as someone who isn't a stranger to the courts and
| judicial system.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Litigation is expensive, you could have qualified for a
| public defender while they burned company assets
|
| > I say this as someone who isn't a stranger to the courts and
| judicial system.
|
| This wouldn't be a criminal case, how are public defenders
| relevant?
|
| For not being a stranger, you seem sort of unfamiliar with the
| potential downsides of being involved in legal action, the
| existence of damages/remedies, etc.
| jawns wrote:
| > you could have qualified for a public defender
|
| In general, that's only for criminal matters. At least, that's
| what the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel pertains to.
|
| That said, sometimes public defenders are appointed in certain
| limited non-criminal proceedings, but a case about intellectual
| property is not one where you'd qualify for a public defender.
| YorickPeterse wrote:
| The premise of being sued should be enough to scare most
| people, whether they are right or wrong. As such it's not
| surprising.
| [deleted]
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| The email didn't say suing. It just said he was going to talk
| to his lawyers. Just wait for a cease and desist. If someone
| can replicate you code and maintain it as an OSS project,
| there is absolutely no way that wouldn't be the lawyers first
| step. I'm not shaming him cause that's still scary, but this
| is a just another CEO thinking they can do what they want.
| eCa wrote:
| > Why did you take it down? And why did you apologize?
|
| I think taking it down (temporary at first) is prudent in that
| situation, but I agree about the apology. Don't apologize
| unless you agree you have done something wrong.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Defense is a lot more expensive than offense in civil court.
| Complicated cases like these can be dragged for years and
| they'd have to pay for it. Intellectual property laws are very
| in the favor of whomever has the money to throw lawyers around.
| megous wrote:
| Yes, but what would replit gain? Going after such a case
| would have given them nothing except for some expense.
|
| Dragging random people through court without any meaningful
| expected outcome sure doesn't seem like something VC's would
| like to fund. I'm not a VC though. Do they just rubber stamp
| whatever bullshit behavior from a CEO?
| acdha wrote:
| Once it becomes personal, don't assume economic analysis
| will have any weight in the decision to continue suing.
|
| VCs give money but they're not going to micromanage the
| company unless something becomes a major distraction. Given
| how much the VC model involves finding things to monetize,
| I would not expect strong pushback against a claim that
| they have IP to protect (that's an asset which the VCs co-
| own & intend to monetize) and if they have a lawyer on
| retainer it might not even be much of an expense to pursue
| early on.
| SSLy wrote:
| Your question about replit assumes the CEO behaves
| logically.
| juancb wrote:
| On the other hand what would such a move get Radon? Amjad
| seemed to sense that maybe he was fishing for a job. Which
| to me it seems like he was especially being a new grad. The
| approach backfired and now he airs the interaction which
| gets Radon publicity.
|
| We only have one side of the story so it's hard to tell
| what exactly is going on here.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Seems like Radon was just being friendly. The CEO had
| shared with Radon some progress and looks like he was
| just updating him on what he had been up to.
| testudovictoria wrote:
| This isn't about what Replit can gain. It's about stifling
| this before it can ever become something more that a legal
| threat. Replit is banking on legal pressure to win this for
| them, because there's likely a nasty PR fallout on the
| other side of actual litigation.
| floren wrote:
| Unless I was sure the EFF or similar organization was ready to
| take me on pro bono, I'd do a lot to avoid the Corporate
| Nuisance Lawsuit Cannon. A fun evening project isn't worth
| years in court and hundreds of thousands spent on legal fees--
| and Replit knows this.
|
| Hopefully by publicizing what happened, he might get an offer
| for legal defense if necessary, then reinstate the project.
| [deleted]
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| >> I say this as someone who isn't a stranger to the courts and
| judicial system.
|
| I question this is you are saying that welcoming a lawsuit is a
| good idea for a side project. That could be years of expensive
| headaches for literately zero gain other than being able to say
| I get to keep my side project up.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Why did you take it down? And why did you apologize?
|
| Probably because he actually did do something that, if not
| explicitly wrong/illegal, then at the very least on the
| borderline of being so.
|
| And he has very little to gain by fighting this. He got his
| clicks and likes already. What would he need to website for?
| sangupta wrote:
| Naturally, I took down my project right away...
|
| Did your internship had any no-conflict, no-compete clause for
| any future assignments? Or are you infringing on any patent?
|
| If not, there is no need to succumb to this bullying.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Wow never expected Repl.it to be so rotten in the core. I've
| followed their journey and happily recommend them on several
| occasions. Looks like after getting YC branding all gloves came
| off, and the success has gotten in their heads. Such a pity.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| A fancy funded company like Replit getting scared by an intern's
| weekend project is entertaining. If your moat is so low it can be
| replicated in a few days, I think this open source project is the
| least of their worries.
| whymauri wrote:
| They offered to hire him before insinuating he was a
| bad/demanding intern, as well. This is standard manipulative
| behavior and has little benefit to anyone besides attempting to
| make the intern feel bad. This isn't the first time I've seen a
| founder resort to this exact type of behavior before
| threatening legal action.
| jtouri wrote:
| Reading this part really made my head shake. Attacking a
| former intern like that, why would anyone want to intern
| there after this?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Who would want to _use_ replit after reading that? They
| might have just killed their company. All it would really
| take is for this guy to put his site back up and add shared
| links.
| mssundaram wrote:
| You should check out Replit's Glassdoor reviews - avoid!
| zenlikethat wrote:
| That's why I'm glad the OP spoke up. Abusive behavior like
| this shouldn't be tolerated in the industry and is sadly
| common. Now I know to avoid this company and individual.
| archibaldJ wrote:
| I would play devil's advocate here and say that the situation
| is probably muddier than it is presented in the blog. Also
| there appers to be a level of trust here (at least the Replit
| CEO trusted that OP will not make this go viral on HN and
| spiral into a PR nightmare I suppose, which though is the
| most entertaining path it can take)
|
| Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study
| of who not to hire.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I don't think anyone who doesn't work for you has any
| obligation whatsoever to consider your image. As a CEO and
| public face of a company you should go ahead and assume
| that anyone you threaten or badmouth will go ahead and talk
| about it online, on the news, or with a bullhorn at the
| local mall.
|
| He willingly traded some percentage chance at a competitor
| using an open source project to steal some percentage of
| his business for this PR nightmare. Personally I think this
| effort shows the bar for such a project is pretty low so I
| don't think shutting it down was a good trade off. I think
| it shows immaturity, bad will, bad faith and honestly its
| more of a case study in whom not to work for. Most people
| they would want to hire are liable to have multiple
| options. They can ill afford to be an undesirable choice.
| blazespin wrote:
| Yeah, we are just getting one side.
|
| That said, all the possible IP in something like this is in
| security, reliability, scalability and good UX.
|
| Severely doubt the OP spent much time on that.
|
| The CEO is probably just having trouble dealing with stress
| and is acting out. It happens.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| It's their job to _not_ act out.
| whymauri wrote:
| >The CEO is probably just having trouble dealing with
| stress and is acting out. It happens.
|
| I agree it's not uncommon for first-time founders/CEOs to
| see phantom ghosts and lash out; however, we should be
| careful to not normalize that kind of behavior. Founders
| often hold mentorship or supervisory positions over their
| current and ex-employees, so it's harmful when they react
| with aggression and manipulation.
|
| At small companies, that betrayal of trust cuts deeper
| than it does in more common manager-employee
| relationships, IMO.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > The CEO is probably just having trouble dealing with
| stress and is acting out. It happens.
|
| That doesn't give them a free pass to lash out at people.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Why are we making excuses for highly paid professionals
| behavior in the public performance of their job.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Also there appers to be a level of trust here._
|
| Amjad, replit's CEO, offered to hire OP, later accused them
| of copying their "internal designs", then threatened them
| with lawyers replit's millions can buy, eventually to
| stonewall and stop replying to their emails. What kind of
| trust is that?
|
| > _Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case
| study of who not to hire._
|
| That's a valid perspective, alright. One that's minority I
| sincerely hope.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| I'd say he is pretty darn talented
| bccdee wrote:
| I'm pretty skeptical. I think a rational actor wouldn't
| have made legal threats. Even if OP's project does somehow
| use some secret insight from replit, it's certainly not a
| threat to replit's business in any way. Legal action would
| be a waste of time, money, and PR.
|
| Which means that the legal threats levelled against OP are
| presumably coming from a place of emotion and personal
| resentment, and I'm very much not prepared to extend the
| benefit of the doubt to replit under those circumstances.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| CEOs get _very_ invested in their projects. It 's pretty
| much expected. It's their entire life. Many of them have
| invested _everything_ into their companies, and are
| terrified of failures (there 's an awful lot of FAIL out
| there).
|
| Different Principals have different ways of evaluating
| threats, and reacting to them. At first glance, this
| seems like an awful mistake, on the part of the Replit
| people (Can you say "own goal"? I knew you could!).
|
| Maybe there's more to the tale than appears here, but it
| does seem fairly straightforward; assuming that the
| emails shared tell the whole story.
|
| I hope that everyone finds a way past this, and comes out
| OK.
|
| One thing that I will say, is that the OP seems to be
| pretty sharp. He's young, and maybe he reacted more
| quickly and naively than a cynical old bastard like Yours
| Truly would, but he has done a pretty cool job on his
| project. It might not be "ship-ready," but it sounds like
| a great demonstration of his capabilities.
|
| Also, as Elon Musk shows, CEOs can cause tremendous
| damage, if they go off-script. Being a CEO of a
| public/funded company is a fairly awesome Responsibility.
| It needs to be taken seriously.
|
| I'd say that this very thread shows the damage that can
| be done to the company. Having this pinned at #1 on HN
| for all this time is devastating. It's actually kind of
| horrifying. Like watching a slow-motion train wreck. A
| lot of Replit employees and VCs are going to take it in
| the shorts from this. He's probably got some 'splainin'
| to do...
|
| I can't remember the company, but there's a famous object
| lesson of a UK CEO that destroyed his life's work and
| corporation, by mentioning an upcoming product too early.
| whymauri wrote:
| Welp, I think you posted 4+ more times than intended
| while HN was having server issues. Maybe dang can fix it
| or you can delete them, lol.
|
| Besides that, 100% agree on the personal
| investment/grandeur trap for founders.
| dang wrote:
| Yes, it was our fault (specifically mine), not
| ChrisMarshallNY's. I've marked the previous comments
| dupes and left the latest one.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I deleted a couple of them. Thanks!
|
| Kudos on fixing what was probably a fairly terrifying
| problem.
| dang wrote:
| Terrifying enough that I missed the brain-dead, obvious
| solution for 2 hours. Twas ever thus!
| munk-a wrote:
| Computers are the worst solution to any problem except
| all the others that have been tried before.
|
| - Churchill (probably)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| CEOs get _very_ invested in their projects. It 's pretty
| much expected. It's their entire life. Many of them have
| invested _everything_ into their companies, and are
| terrified of failures (there 's an awful lot of FAIL out
| there).
|
| Different Principals have different ways of evaluating
| threats, and reacting to them. At first glance, this
| seems like an awful mistake, on the part of the Replit
| people (Can you say "own goal"? I knew you could!).
|
| Maybe there's more to the tale than appears here, but it
| does seem fairly straightforward; assuming that the
| emails shared tell the whole story.
|
| I hope that everyone finds a way past this, and comes out
| OK.
|
| One thing that I will say, is that the OP seems to be
| pretty sharp. He's young, and maybe he reacted more
| quickly and naively than a cynical old bastard like Yours
| Truly would, but he has done a pretty cool job on his
| project. It might not be "ship-ready," but it sounds like
| a great demonstration of his capabilities.
|
| Also, as Elon Musk shows, CEOs can cause tremendous
| damage, if they go off-script. Being a CEO of a
| public/funded company is a fairly awesome Responsibility.
| It needs to be taken seriously.
|
| I'd say that this very thread shows the damage that can
| be done to the company. Having this pinned at #1 on HN
| for all this time is devastating. It's actually kind of
| horrifying. Like watching a slow-motion train wreck. A
| lot of Replit employees and VCs are going to take it in
| the shorts from this. He's probably got some 'splainin'
| to do...
|
| I can't remember the company, but there's a famous object
| lesson of a UK CEO that destroyed his life's work and
| corporation, by mentioning an upcoming product too early
| in a BBC interview.
| nick__m wrote:
| The company was the Osborne Computer Corporation and
| announcing a product successor too early is called the
| Osborne Effect
| ska wrote:
| > I think a rational actor wouldn't have made legal
| threats.
|
| The problem with applying the "rational actor" test here,
| or anywhere really, is that to a first approximation
| people are not rational actors.
| bccdee wrote:
| Yeah, people aren't rational. But when people start
| behaving dangerously (making legal threats, etc), I think
| they ought to be acting rationally -- _especially_ if
| they 're in a position of power.
|
| So when a CEO makes legal threats against some random
| dev's side project, seemingly out of a sense of
| entitlement to the very idea of a polyglot code sandbox,
| I'm going to be pretty harsh.
| ska wrote:
| > I'm going to be pretty harsh.
|
| What exactly are you skeptical about? It's read to me
| like you were disbelieving the story because you didn't
| believe the CEO would act that way. To the contrary, it's
| entirely plausible (regardless of truth).
|
| We can completely agree that people _ought_ to be
| behaving more rationally, but empirically in enough
| cases, they don 't.
| debacle wrote:
| Talent or not, having the passion to put together a crazy
| project like this that has no real practical use but is
| very interesting - I would want to hire that person over
| someone with a bit more skill.
| archibaldJ wrote:
| > that has no real practical use
|
| Well this can be developed into a great replit competitor
| opnitro wrote:
| I don't think this is true. As the author notes, he
| doesn't have any ability to scale due to simplistic
| design decisions he made. As the author notes, the hard
| part of this business is not "write a webserver that
| takes a program from a user and runs it"
| dsr_ wrote:
| Indeed, a great deal of current security work is on the
| problem of not running other people's code.
| rot13xor wrote:
| I thought these type of interpreters ran in the user's
| browser. Cross-compile the interpreter to JS or webasm,
| stream it to the user after they click on which language
| to use. Built-in libraries could be streamed on-demand
| the same way or they can be bundled with the interpreter.
| It would solve the scalability and security problem.
| opnitro wrote:
| Yeah, the entire premise of this kind of company is
| asking strangers to give you arbitrary code and then
| running it. I imagine there ares some important design
| decisions there that are not trivial to replicate. At it
| seems the author made _no_ attempt to replicate them, as
| he said anyone could knock his server over easily w/ a
| fork bomb.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Even so, the fact that Repl.it felt so threatened by it
| as to threaten legal action and bully someone into taking
| it down speaks volumes to its viability as a competitor.
| The inability to scale can be fixed - probably not
| _trivially_ , obviously, but it's very much a
| possibility.
| archibaldJ wrote:
| If the code is well-documented and everything is nicely
| set up, you just need the right person who has access to
| VC and an untapped market (e.g. China) to pick it up and
| spin off from there
|
| Or at least it would save up a lot of boostrapping cost.
| Otherwise this whole thing indeed makes no sense.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > If the code is well-documented and everything is nicely
| set up, you just need the right person who has access to
| VC and an untapped market (e.g. China) to pick it up and
| spin off from there
|
| I think the idea is that it's trivial to take what you've
| described and add "a small amount of work that an early-
| career engineer (even if talented) describes as easy".
| 3np wrote:
| Or self-hosted, on your own workstation or private
| server. It has great practical use despite not yielding
| corporate or investment profits.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| It's not the whole picture, but the article links to the
| full email exchange. It's difficult for me to imagine what
| missing information would lead to the CEO's messages being
| appropriate.
| sintaxi wrote:
| OP did take the project offline - which shows there is at
| least some doubt in his own mind.
| Pick-A-Hill2019 wrote:
| In regards to your comment about the situation being a bit
| muddier than presented: I would suggest that you take a
| look through the unabridged version as linked in the post (
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210530184721/https://imgur.co
| m... )
|
| Rather than downvoting your comment I opted to reply to it
| since it may provide a bit more information for you to base
| your judgement on about "things being muddier".
|
| As for your last comment about their abilities - forgive me
| but that sounds incredibly unfair and unwarranted and
| verges on being a personal attack.
| jstanley wrote:
| > Not sure how talented OP is.
|
| Based on the commit log in the article, he added support
| for running code in 79 programming languages in 4 days. I'd
| say he's probably pretty talented.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| _> Also there appers to be a level of trust here (at least
| the Replit CEO trusted that OP will not make this go viral
| on HN and spiral into a PR nightmare I suppose, which
| though is the most entertaining path it can take)_
|
| I don't get what you're saying here. It's not a breach of
| trust to speak publicly about someone threatening legal
| action against you.
| seoaeu wrote:
| If fact, most people would probably consider threatening
| legal action to be forfeiting any trust the two might
| previously have had.
| sintaxi wrote:
| Agreed. Also denying the request for a courtesy call
| after the takedown was a bit insulting considering the
| work was trashed without a fight.
| hitekker wrote:
| > at least the Replit CEO trusted that OP will not make
| this go viral on HN and spiral into a PR nightmare I
| suppose,
|
| From reading the emails, it looks like the Replit CEO
| "trusted" that the OP was cowed into submission.
| arp242 wrote:
| Unless there was an NDA or some such (and since this isn't
| mentioned anywhere in the emails or post, I assume there's
| not) you can hardly sue someone for re-using knowledge they
| acquired during their job. How are you even supposed to
| know what the supposed super-magic super-secret sauce is if
| you never agreed to an NDA?
|
| If that was the case almost everyone with a GitHub project
| could be sued to infinity, because almost everyone learns
| tons of things every day while working.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| They are probably making hand wavey threats because in
| actuality they have nothing.
| zenlikethat wrote:
| There are usually trade secret clauses with lots of
| potential for abuse.
| allo37 wrote:
| That part kind of surprised me: I figured pretty much
| every job (even internships) makes you sign some sort of
| noncompete agreement these days.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Repl.it is based in California where noncompetes are
| especially difficult to enforce.
|
| https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-
| enforceable-in...
|
| Specifically California Business and Professions Code
| Section 16600,
|
| "every contract by which anyone is restrained from
| engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of
| any kind is to that extent void."
|
| In addition such issues must by law be decided in
| California courts and if they forced the issue into court
| and lost they would be liable for the cost of his
| defense.
|
| Even outside of California there are limits to what you
| can enforce. Judges aren't liable to find that an
| infinite duration noncompete reasonable.
|
| Another example in Washington State its now impossible to
| obtain noncompetes for anyone paid less than a rate of
| 100k per annum as an employee or 250k per annum as a
| contractor and they are limited to 18 months duration.
|
| If you improperly assert a noncompete you are liable for
| 5000 or actual damages whichever is greater.
|
| They are probably not asserting a noncompete because it
| is functionally impossible for them to do so. They would
| have to assert that he was making use of trade secrets or
| that in some nebulous way his design belonged to them. eg
| trade dress
|
| https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/intellectual-
| property/...
|
| The answer is you need a lawsuit to decide but probably
| not.
| allo37 wrote:
| I don't live anywhere near California (Quebec), but it's
| kinda the same idea here (from what I've heard).
| Basically employees have the right to make a living and
| the onus is on the employer to prove an injury occured
| directly due to an (ex)employee's actions.
|
| Still didn't stop everyone I've ever worked for from
| making me sign them, enforceable or not. I guess it's
| different elsewhere.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| He might have signed one but it would be legally invalid
| and if pressed in court it would cease to exist in 0.5
| seconds it wouldn't be worth the time to present.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| I fail to see how "you can't copy our product" is the
| same as "restrain[ing] from engaging in a lawful
| profession, trade, or business of any kind".
|
| (That also says nothing about whether such a contract has
| or has not been signed by the relevant parties.)
| jfrunyon wrote:
| It is _extremely_ unlikely that there was no NDA. I 've
| literally only ever had one job that didn't make me sign
| an NDA, and the company had a whopping <10 employees.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > a level of trust here
|
| Trust is destroyed as soon as your first reaction to
| something is to summon lawyers.
|
| I actually somewhat agreed until I read "I will be engaging
| our lawyers on Monday if it is still up by then."
| jjeaff wrote:
| Nothing worse than petty threats in corporate speak. He
| must be serious since he was planning to engage with his
| lawyers rather than just circle back with them.
| wolpoli wrote:
| The CEO is actually worried that this weekend project will make
| it hard for replit to raise fundings from investors because it
| makes it look like there is no moat to hosting hundreds of
| programming languages. The investors don't know that the code
| here doesn't scale.
| mypalmike wrote:
| Also, there is no moat. As far as I know, there are no major
| protected intellectual properties, technical or business
| learning curves, regulatory hurdles, intensive capitalization
| requirements, economies of scale... I suppose there may be
| some amount of network effect, but not so much that it's hard
| to imagine a competitor struggling to overcome it.
| wolpoli wrote:
| You are right. Other than the brand name recognition and
| the existing business relationships, I can't think of
| anything that would be tough for a funded competitor to
| replicate.
| brabel wrote:
| Agreed... but the intern is obviously incredibly naive in
| thinking that repl.it would be happy to see one of their ex-
| interns working on a project that does pretty much the same
| kind of thing they're doing... whether or not this is a threat
| to them right now. There's a tiny, but non-zero chance, that
| this project could become successful and who knows, take
| marketshare from repl.it... and while everyone is pretending
| they would never be afraid of an intern stealing their
| business, I doubt many of them saying that have been through
| this experience and know how it feels like running a business
| and trying to stay on top of all the scams and bullshit that
| will get in your way, including from previous "allies" like ex-
| employees who think can do better.
|
| Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of
| people to work on some product, you teach them "secrets of the
| trade", send them to conferences, let them participate in
| making decisions, giving them extraordinary insight in the area
| of work you are active on... and as soon as they leave your
| company, they use all that knowledge to try to create something
| with that on their own (I can understand it, once you konw
| stuff and enjoy it, you want to keep working on it even in your
| own time), just for fun... basically spreading some of that
| knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible
| not only to future contributors of their project, but to all
| competitors and genuine copycats out there.
|
| This is incredibly unprofessional. If he had at least come up
| with something original based on that knowledge , I would be
| totally on his side, but his stuff, while it may not be an
| exact copy of repl.it, is clearly doing the exact same thing...
| how is that not at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do
| that.
|
| Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working
| hard for several years to get an idea out to the world and make
| it work for others as good as they can... if you want to use
| your knowledge, just contribute back to the project if it's
| open-source (your contribution will be a lot more useful, very
| likely, to other people than your poor, basic little project)!
| If you actually want to compete, which the author claims was
| not at all his goal (yeah, right, until someone shows even a
| trace of interest in paying something for it), then by all
| means go ahead and act reckless, but you'll need to come up
| with some pretty major advantage to have any chance, and will
| be taking pretty huge risks with lawsuits, but that's business
| as usual in the corporate world.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| What an odd take.
|
| There was respect shown.
|
| Replit is not that innovative or the pioneer of this idea -
| many have done this so many times before
|
| Wit this silly logic, nobody can ever work for a compeitor.
|
| Was Zoom's CEO unprofessional for starting Zoom after working
| so long in WebEx? How about Jet.com founder after working at
| Amazon?
| brabel wrote:
| Well, but most people are saying the company shouldn't be
| afraid of an intern... and you are rightly pointing out
| that ex-employees take what they've learned and start a
| competitor all the time, sometimes very successfully (I do
| think some of your examples are imoral if you ask me, but
| in business, I know that what's not illegal gets a pass
| however repugnant)... that's why so many companies have
| contracts that will forbid you from doing so (illegal in
| some jurisdictions, but I believe it's legal in most).
| kbenson wrote:
| If all the person leaving is doing is creating the same
| thing, it's unlikely to be worthwhile. You'd be competing
| against an entrenched competitor with a customer base and
| brand recognition. What makes it worthwhile is if you
| want to do something different that they're unwilling to
| do.
|
| For Zoom, that was to market the product to random people
| for free or close to free because the cost to provide it
| had fallen enough to make it worth while.. WebEx was
| unwilling or unable to do so. I'm sure it was suggested
| many times. Probably even by the soon to be CEO of Zoom
| before he left to do it himself.
|
| Sometimes the original company is worried about
| cannibalizing their sales, or shifting focus from their
| current customers, or it's just plain a case of them
| moving far too slowly to take advantage of the market.
| These are all cases where someone leaving and starting a
| new company to serve this demand is a good thing for
| consumers, regardless of whether it's good for the
| original company. Companies that can't respond to market
| needs are inefficient, and in a well functioning market
| suffer for that.
|
| In a poorly functioning market, such as one with overly
| onerous regulatory hurdles, or litigation preventing
| competition, or customer lock-in, customers are given
| fewer choices and competition is constrained. People
| taking their expertise and making new companies to serve
| different segments of that market is a feature, not a bug
| or problem. It's how the market works. If repl.it is
| worried about a hobby project that can't scale and
| doesn't seem to be attempting to compete in the market,
| how much value is it actually providing? Threatening
| litigation says a lot more about their product than the
| competitor, IMO, and what it says is not flattering.
| duped wrote:
| It's pretty much understood that your institutional knowledge
| will go for a walk in this industry. Taking it personally is
| more unprofessional than what the intern did.
|
| > it is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not
| at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do that.
|
| Ideas aren't worth the paper they're written on, and a
| startup founder should know that better than anyone else.
| Hell, wasn't Fairchild "the same idea" as Shockley Semi?
|
| I have a lot of respect for what repl.it _is_ and their
| vision, and the intern did not come close to copying it. But
| I did lose a bit of respect for the current leadership if
| this is how they respond to toy reimplementations of certain
| features.
| lupire wrote:
| A huge number of companies including YC companies are built
| by Ex Amazon and ex Google employees cloning corporate tech.
| burnished wrote:
| I think this is a bad a take. How many different positive
| ways was there to approach this situation? The response from
| the CEO was incredibly unprofessional and seemed
| unnecessarily antagonistic to the point of provocation.
| sangupta wrote:
| > basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them
| and making it packaged and accessible not only to future
| contributors of their project, but to all competitors and
| genuine copycats out there
|
| With this reasoning anyone at Amazon cannot join another
| ecommerce, or anyone at Microsoft OS cannot join Apple, or
| anyone in iPhone team cannot join Android.
|
| If you are worried that your product is at the mercy of
| people not talking about it, or experimenting with the
| knowledge in future, then thats the least of your worries.
| The product, the team and the company is in a deep mess.
| mannykannot wrote:
| OP had anticipated your complaints in his post, and pre-
| replied to them. For example:
|
| _Replit makes a webapp you can use to run code online in
| different programming languages. This is nothing new (just
| Google "run python online" for proof), so Replit's value
| proposition is extra features like sharing your work,
| installing third-party packages, and hosting webapps._
|
| ...
|
| _Now, none of the ideas I used in my open-source project
| were "internal design decisions": they've all been published
| publicly on Replit's blog (I knew this because I'd been asked
| to write some of those blog posts during my internship). And
| my project also wasn't any more of a Replit clone than any of
| the other websites on the first few pages of Google results
| for "run python online", most of which look exactly the
| same._
|
| You may disagree with these claims, but the general /
| hypothetical stance of your post does not give me any reason
| to think OP is blowing smoke up our collective asses.
|
| For that matter, the CEO of Replit could be more specific
| about what OP's 'crime' is, though I suspect the worst of it
| is that OP's actions revealed how threadbare the Emperor's
| clothes are.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Agreed... but the intern is obviously incredibly naive in
| thinking that repl.it would be happy to see one of their ex-
| interns working on a project that does pretty much the same
| kind of thing they 're doing.. whether or not this is a
| threat to them right now. There's a tiny, but non-zero
| chance, that this project could become successful and who
| knows, take marketshare from repl.it..._
|
| Too bad, that's business and how a functioning free market
| works. If it's that important to Replit, then they should
| patent it. If they can't get a patent then, again, too bad.
| dmurray wrote:
| There are other legitimate ways of protecting trade
| secrets, such as requiring people to sign an NDA and/or
| non-compete before they see your secret sauce.
|
| I'm not defending how the CEO behaved here - it looks very
| unprofessional at best - but the patent system is not the
| only or the best mechanism to enforce intellectual property
| rights.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I bring up patents because of the last line in the OP
| that insinuates that it wouldn't be out of character for
| Repl.it to react similarly to competing businesses:
|
| > _If someone with an actual commercial enterprise were
| to offend Replit, I shudder to think what treatment they
| might receive._
|
| Patents would cover both the employee and outside
| competitor situations.
| adkadskhj wrote:
| Why bother? Seems throwing their money around is
| functionality well enough.
|
| Not sure what they'll do if another company decides to
| reinvent it.. but /shrug
|
| _(to be clear, not defending them at all)_
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Of course he's naive. He's just out of college, would you
| have been more savvy at that age?
| brabel wrote:
| No. I didn't even say I was any less naive :D I am talking
| from experience, almost got into trouble because of similar
| behaviour, but after thinking hard about the situation, I
| decided that I was actually in the wrong for thinking I can
| just take what I learned and give it for free to the world
| and my old company's competitors to do as they wish. I can
| see how I, as the CEO, would've not thought nicely of such
| behaviour.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| ", is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not
| at least "stealing the idea"??"
|
| Vague general ideas like "a car" or "140 character limit" are
| not property, and so cannot be stolen.
|
| Acting this way is superbly entitled.
| cycomanic wrote:
| >Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of
| people to work on some product, you teach them "secrets of
| the trade", send them to conferences, let them participate in
| making decisions, giving them extraordinary insight in the
| area of work you are active on... and as soon as they leave
| your company, they use all that knowledge to try to create
| something with that on their own (I can understand it, once
| you konw stuff and enjoy it, you want to keep working on it
| even in your own time), just for fun... basically spreading
| some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged
| and accessible not only to future contributors of their
| project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out
| there.
|
| Two things, first: You write like the company did the
| teaching, sending to conferences, allowing to participate ...
| out of the goodness of their heart. Obviously they did this
| because they saw a value in this, in fact they even pay their
| employees money to do these things.
|
| Moreover, what do you think happens when people leave
| companies, they never use the knowledge they acquired? Do the
| companies continue to own that knowledge? Moreover, it even
| happens all the time employee leave and even found direct
| competitors to their previous employees. Just look at the
| founding history of Intel for a famous example. Also by the
| same measures we could accuse the repl.it CEO of stealing
| ideas from codeacademy and facebook where he worked
| previously, I mean he build an interactive website.
| sombremesa wrote:
| Codecademy does let you run code in the browser, so they
| would actually have a case at least as strong as repl.it
| does against this intern.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Specifically, according to Codeacademy, he worked on the
| Codeacademy Labs product, which is similar to Repl.it.
| djur wrote:
| > how is that not at least "stealing the idea"??
|
| Because Replit didn't originate the idea of "web site you can
| execute code on". There's no idea to be stolen here, or if
| there was stealing, it's not from Replit.
| nso wrote:
| If what the ex-intern did can be summarized as slapping an
| eval() around a form submission and that would somehow
| threaten your business model then your product is
| intellectually void and garbage.
| ggoo wrote:
| So once I've done one kind of work I shouldn't ever do that
| again for fear of offending my previous employer? Do you hear
| how ridiculous that sounds?
| bsjxh wrote:
| > If he had at least come up with something original based on
| that knowledge
|
| Repl.it itself is completely unoriginal... there's been
| websites doing this stuff for decades now. Of course, the CEO
| has to live in denial of this, and is easily
| threatened/offended when confronted by this reality.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > there's been websites doing this stuff for decades now.
|
| Would this hold up in case of a lawsuit? I mean, can
| Replit's CEO accuse the guy of copying some of their work
| if there's evidence of prior art that predates both
| projects?
| aniforprez wrote:
| I'm sorry but this is a lot of words to say "be subservient
| to your old boss". There's nothing wrong in what this dude
| did. He made an open source experiment and for that he was
| threatened practically at gun point. The contents of the
| emails he received are highly unprofessional and childishly
| antagonistic
| mfer wrote:
| VC funded companies aren't some tech billionaire funding a cool
| new project.
|
| VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on.
| It shouldn't be surprising when people try very hard to protect
| that investment to help them get a better return.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > VC funded companies are investments that they want a return
| on. It shouldn't be surprising when people try very hard to
| protect that investment to help them get a better return.
|
| Yeah, but if the investment is threatened by a weekend
| project built in a few days, it means that a serious
| competitor could destroy it in a couple weeks.
|
| The thought that came to mind about this was a baker stepping
| on ants outside his store because nobody was coming into the
| store. If nobody wants to come into the store because of ants
| crawling in front, your store has larger issues.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| It doesn't have to be surprising to be entertaining!
| mcguire wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how hard is "very hard"?
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| It sits next to the midpoint between "hard" and "very, very
| hard"
| shkkmo wrote:
| It's a midpoint only on a logarithmic scale.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "People try very hard to protect that investment and that's
| why gangsters tracked down where you live and broke your
| legs"
|
| If someone is invested and stands to loose money, it does not
| gice them a free pass to act immorally.
| cryptica wrote:
| The whole startup space is disgusting. There are a bunch of
| lucky founders 'chosen ones' who get a ton of VC funding; as
| soon as they accept VC funding, users 'magically' start pouring
| in (cabal/manipulation?), which attracts more funding... Then
| some megacorp acquires the startup for millions of dollars.
| Easy peasy.
|
| Then these lucky, spoiled-rotten assholes think they're
| entitled to sue anyone who tries to compete with them. Everyone
| knows this is not a free market. Just a bunch of artificially
| selected spoiled brats with rich daddies/friends enriching
| themselves by destroying society.
| mitko wrote:
| I wouldn't underestimate the potential of that project.
|
| I know of other cases where well funded CEOs have tried
| bullying away someone who recently worked for them from
| starting a company in a related space. Glad that they weren't
| able to shut it down, and the new founder has raised a nice
| round. I'd love to see Radon succeed with his project.
|
| IANAL but I don't think you can patent "path depencence". It is
| sunk cost
| szundi wrote:
| They cannot as it was already published (by... them)
| Ocha wrote:
| 100% agree. If this threatened them, it means they are not
| doing well.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Or it may simply reflect the personal style and values of the
| CEO Amjad Masad notwithstanding their company position.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Or both.
| [deleted]
| anticristi wrote:
| Gosh, I wish I received 20 million in funding for that idea
| that needed three days to be technically replicated by an
| intern.
|
| My wish: Replit should sue intern, intern should get free
| attorney from EFF, case should be dismissed as "WTF" in court.
| Future CEOs will know that "an intern would need three days to
| technically replicate" is not a differentiator. Also, hope is
| not a strategy. VCs would learn that hearing BS from CEO is not
| "due diligence".
|
| Intern would eventually be showered in money for speaking to
| further CEOs about that one mistake they should never do.
|
| The world would move on and be a better place for everyone,
| except unprepared CEOs.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| How long would it take an intern to replicate Twitter? Is
| Twitter worth millions? I think so.
|
| I think it's really easy for tech teams to do things in a
| sub-optimal way and then get all caught up in fixing problems
| of their own making and start to think they're doing really
| great technical work and that it is a competitive advantage
| for the company. More companies need to face the fact that
| their software can be easily replicated and that the value
| lies elsewhere, such as brand, reputation, reliability, good
| customer service, etc -- other things that an intern can't
| replicate in a weekend.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Replit is crushing it on reputation at the moment.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Creating a facebook clone has been done by many and some
| like vk have achieved regional success but they are in that
| unique position because of brand. Facebook started to be
| used as a word I'll facebook you meant I will write you.
| That is similiar to I'll google that means to search for
| something.
|
| Facebook playbook for market rise is legendary. The limited
| rollout, the college based communities based on your edu
| email created this campus privacy and campus group.
| Starting off with the ivy league schools and slowly working
| into other schools created this demand as people talked. By
| the time facebook opened to the general public they had
| such a buzz. When they rolled out to this group they
| included one killer feature.. they allowed you to give your
| hotmail email/password and they would get a list of your
| contacts from your email and invite them to facebook. That
| brought in your aunt, brother, old friends to facebook.
| That created a network effect. Throw in the whatapps story
| and instagram story and an election/congressional hearings
| and you have facebook today.
|
| The code part seems so minor. Retracing their steps is
| impossible. The path to facebook killer is a huge challenge
| to think that could only be done in a weekend is crazy.
| risyachka wrote:
| It's kinda funny how their CEO writes on Twitter all the time
| that they are the best company in the world, with the best
| product, do most innovations in tech etc and 10 minutes later
| he is threatened by a small open-source project that wasn't
| even created to compete.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I feel great that others see how ridiculous Amjad is...
| Replit is cool but has a serious attitude.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah - I don't really like piling on, but Replit and Roam
| both give off massive alarms for me regarding the founders.
|
| Both seem to think they're Xerox PARC - or the most ambitious
| software companies on earth, both products seem pretty
| underwhelming.
|
| Just seems wildly disproportionate to what they're doing. At
| least Steve Jobs was actually building stuff that was
| revolutionary. Elon Musk is building reusable rockets and
| pulling EVs from the future to modern day. Roam is making
| another centralized document editor?
|
| In terms of software ambition neither of them come close to
| Urbit in what they're trying to accomplish, and Galen is not
| an ass about it.
| aparsons wrote:
| Right? REPL.it is - unironically - a weekend project, that
| the founder loves to pretend is a marvel of engineering
| fossuser wrote:
| I don't know if I'd go that far - I think dev environment
| set up is a massive pain, especially for newbies and it
| scares a lot of people away from development because of
| constant issues.
|
| Solving this would be helpful for teaching and I think
| it's not trivial to do well. I think there's an argument
| that being good at troubleshooting and debugging is 90%
| of programming so the shitty dev environment setup
| currently is a bit of a filter, but I generally think
| that's a bad status quo rationalization.
|
| All this is to say - I think there's a market and the
| product is likely valuable, but I also don't think it's
| reusable rockets or rebuilding the internet or the 'most
| ambitious software company in history'. This kind of
| framing turns me off and when paired with stuff like this
| post leads me to avoid the company entirely.
| aszen wrote:
| Recently repl.it announced they will integrate nix pkgs
| into their environment. They are simply building a better
| ux on top of existing open source technology.
| fossuser wrote:
| > "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system
| yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account,
| mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or
| CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this
| FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
|
| Building a better UX isn't done 'simply' - and the result
| is often worth billions.
| aszen wrote:
| If u are looking at this from a profitable angle then
| getting ux right is about gaining more users and making
| them pay. Technical innovation is about creating
| something which wasn't possible before and not making a
| start-up wrapper over existing stuff. In today's
| misaligned businesss models of marketing and advertising,
| there is less core technical research and more fluff
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Well, these are things that most tech people know, we just
| don't discuss them because we're polite.
| boothrowaway wrote:
| Word on the street is that the Roam founder Conan is also
| getting pushed out for dehumanizing women and abusing meth,
| and being a general jackass. Silicon Valley has the best
| culture.
| caslon wrote:
| Isn't equating "victim of drug addiction" and "harms
| women" out of line? One is something that isn't really
| his fault and isn't because of his moral failings, and
| the other is dehumanizing nearly half of the population.
| fastball wrote:
| Given that his name isn't even Conan, everyone should
| probably treat this as the baseless hearsay that it seems
| to be.
| odyslam wrote:
| This tweet didn't age well.
| https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1324100838894305281
| fossuser wrote:
| I don't know the truth around that either way, but I
| think Roam is based in Utah at some ranch (even if
| they're funded by a16z). I wouldn't generalize his
| behavior to the rest of silicon valley culture.
|
| I think his brother was also the QAnon shaman horn guy
| (at least he said as much on Twitter - maybe it was a
| joke?).
| bb88 wrote:
| > I wouldn't generalize his behavior to the rest of
| silicon valley culture.
|
| I get what you're saying here, but they made an entire TV
| series lampooning silicon valley culture.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah and I liked it - good tongue-in-cheek satire that
| exaggerated a lot of things that have some basis in
| truth. It was ultimately a fictional show though and life
| in silicon valley is a lot more boring than that the vast
| majority of the time.
|
| Even in that show nobody was on meth iirc.
| lupire wrote:
| They did an amphetamine dependency and an opium
| dependency.
| mitko wrote:
| I don't think this was his brother - I think it was a
| joke (imo bad taste at the time). I did some research
| around it and it seemed that his brother does look alike
| but that other person had a different legal name.
| pcmaffey wrote:
| He blocked me on Twitter for pointing out something
| (technical) he said was wrong, and then he deleted his tweet.
| Told me everything I need to know about that guy.
| aparsons wrote:
| Mentioned in my other comment, but just all the more
| evidence of a megalomaniac, insecure CEO trying to build a
| company out of shallow moats and little value creation
| advanced-DnD wrote:
| He's deleting a lot of tweets as we speak.. I think he got
| famous
| teddyh wrote:
| Link to your tweet, please?
| pcmaffey wrote:
| https://twitter.com/pcmaffey/status/1117437322927247360
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| What were you responding to?
| hashbig wrote:
| I unfollowed him after he tweeted that Repl.it is the most
| innovative company in the world.
|
| Yeah, not SpaceX or Neuralink or Pfizer. A company that runs
| docker images is the most innovative company.
| nkmnz wrote:
| Are you referring to Pfizer because of the mRNA-vaccine?
| That has actually been invented by the German biotech
| startup BioNTech ;-)
| ipaddr wrote:
| The manufactoring at Pfizer is pretty impressive.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| It's crazy how a little bit of money can turn people into
| jerks.
| imhoguy wrote:
| I think I am going to make Riju clone next weekend, got a name
| even: Disreplty.
| lynxaegon wrote:
| I think we should flood the internet with replit clones :)
| How much money would they want to invest in lawyers?
| weezin wrote:
| replitsuperiority would be a good one too.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| They were funded by YCombinator. Should we expect other YC
| companies to go after open source projects?
| detaro wrote:
| Why would funding by YC in any way suggest that a startup
| might not do that?
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I would love to know how YC does their DD because it seems
| like it's the most shallow and uninformed, meme-driven
| process.
| lapp0 wrote:
| It appears there's at least a little nepotism and/or
| incompetence at play, considering crap like Dreamworld got
| YC'd
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-
| kickst...
| toyg wrote:
| Tbh, YC is not a public taxpayer-funded institution: they
| are free to fund whomever they like, be it nephews,
| spouses, or relatives.
| lapp0 wrote:
| Of course, but they're liable to damage their reputation
| as a VC firm if they continue funding garbage without
| vetting it at all, just cause someone's techbro buddy
| asked nicely for YC's backing.
| moogly wrote:
| And we're free to call it for what it is: nepotism
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Sounds like the plot of the movie Antitrust.
| le-mark wrote:
| Clearly their investors should have funded the intern!
| threatofrain wrote:
| That's part of why someone is a threat to your moat. You
| don't assume that a good rival effort will go unnoticed by
| investors and customers.
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| Well, this is a bummer. I was planning to make replit critical to
| one of my ventures. I've been receiving their emails for a while,
| and their chirpy nature always struck me as a bit odd.
| [deleted]
| komuher wrote:
| I used replit few times but now i'll remove my account there.
| srsly what a bullshit they try to do with taking down open source
| projects cause they feel threaten, pathetic.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| Because why not allow users to run completely unsandboxed code on
| your own servers with no limitations? What could go wrong?
|
| https://github.com/raxod502/python-in-a-box/blob/master/serv...
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| As a meta comment, I will say that given how vocal PG is about
| repl.it and his support of them, the fact that this is the top
| post on HN and it has STAYED there I speaks very highly of dang,
| YC, and the community.
| [deleted]
| mac-chaffee wrote:
| All these battles over IP where there's an enormous power
| imbalance strike me as problems of ego.
|
| In college, I made a website and I thought another student
| "stole" the idea. I considered my legal options, but I'm glad I
| stopped there, even if I did have a case.
|
| The other student was never a serious threat to my idea and in
| fact lost interest in the idea next year. So the only harm I
| suffered was to my ego that thought I deserved power over others
| just because I had an idea slightly before someone else.
|
| I buy into Radon's argument that Replit has substantial value
| outside of "eval()" and is not actually threatened financially.
| As a result, I could understand a founder feeling disappointed at
| discovering clones, but I think it's important to separate harm
| to ego from harm to livelihood.
| daenz wrote:
| >All these battles over IP where there's an enormous power
| imbalance strike me as problems of ego.
|
| Bingo, especially the whole "we now have the resources to crush
| you" attitude. Someone please make sure these jokers never get
| money and power again.
| airocker wrote:
| No idea is original and belongs to anyone. Even airplane was
| possibly derived by looking at birds flying. If you hire an
| intern and they want to use the understanding to open another
| company, it is the best thing that can happen to your business.
| Customers would not start coding online unless they see 20
| options to do so.
| jpxw wrote:
| > despite being the most demanding intern we've ever had
|
| This is unprofessional and downright nasty and vindictive to a
| degree that I find almost unbelievable.
|
| God that little comment has really made my blood boil. I'm going
| to be avoiding repl.it from now onwards.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| It made me laugh because he was trying to hire him earlier in
| the conversation. Pretty pathetic to turn like that.
| clevergadget wrote:
| what a bully. he really punched down. some Weinstein style
| "You'll never work in this town again!" energy.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| One thing I don't understand is: how is that a CEO cannot
| anticipate the consequences of acting like a bully via email? The
| blog post will make a huge negative impact on the reputation of
| Replit... really, CEOs these days don't think before writing?
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I think one can, but maybe experience has (wrongfully) taught
| some of those folks that it can actually be a positive
| experience.
|
| If it weren't for the INCREDIBLY detailed, well-reasoned,
| documented blog post, and its ability to reach the front page,
| the tactics of the CEO would have actually succeeded. He did,
| indeed, take the project down, and took the threat seriously.
| What the CEO didn't anticipate was the intern's ability to get
| so much exposure on this.
|
| I can see this tactic working 95% of the time, which is prob.
| why when it doesn't it REALLY doesn't.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Are there any open source competitors to Replit that are seeking
| patrons? I have been encouraged by the rapid fire Show HNs of
| open source first startups [1], and this space seems ripe for
| such open tooling.
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
| [deleted]
| charlesdaniels wrote:
| Try It Online[0] seems to offer a very similar service - if you
| don't care about the collaboration aspect of it. It claims to
| be self-hostable[1].
|
| glot.io[2] is another, which seems to fit more in the realm of
| "pastebin with runnable snippets".
|
| As I understand it, a big sell of repl.it is that they have
| some kind of collaborative editing support, which none of the
| alternatives I was able to find in a few minutes of digging
| have. Google Colab has this, but only support Python (AFAIK)
| and is not open source.
|
| 0 - https://tio.run/#
|
| 1 - https://github.com/TryItOnline/tiosetup
|
| 2 - https://glot.io/
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Thank you!
| ipodopt wrote:
| https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share
|
| https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/develop-cloud/overview
| neweggrma wrote:
| Eclipse Theia: https://theia-ide.org/
|
| It's an open source project bringing the VS Code user interface
| to the browser. It supports a large number of VS Code
| extensions.
|
| It is by-far the stand-out in this arena, and yet seems to be
| sadly very unknown. VS Code Liveshare and friends are all
| proprietary junk, to be polite.
|
| GitPod.io is a directly usable end-user product.
|
| Theia is used by Google, ARM, Arduino, IBM, Huawei, Ericsson,
| Red Hat, and more. It's seriously good stuff.
| raunak wrote:
| If I'm reading those emails correctly, Amjad the CEO directly
| emailed you occasionally. It is pretty stunning that as the CEO
| of the company, he would stoop to what I interpret as pretty
| unprofessional communication and petty threats.
|
| I also am failing to connect the dots about why Replit would even
| feel threatened - if you were as helpful of an intern as
| described, you'd think they would recognize that you had good
| intentions only when creating Riju - very odd behavior from
| Replit all around.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Well, I wrote a small comment here on replit, and their CEO
| actually tracked me down by username on another forum, and sent
| me a PM there.
|
| Nothing harmful, he was just curious about what I liked or
| didn't like about using replit - tbh I found it pretty cool
| that they're so close to the user base. Saw the message weeks
| afterwards, and forgot the reply him.
| tomp wrote:
| I'd agree with you if this was just a random person, but from
| this thread (I haven't read the article) I gather that s/he was
| actually an intern... surely every intern/employee would sign
| some kind of non-compete / trade secret / intellectual property
| agreement? In that case, the CEO is completely justified in
| pursuing to enforce that agreement!
|
| Again, it would be different if the CEO threatened a random
| third party that happened to do a weekend project in the same
| vertical...
| darrenoc wrote:
| Why are you reading and replying to the comments when you
| haven't read the article? You've come at this with a terrible
| take by inventing a non-existent NDA that would exonerate the
| CEO. Why bother?
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| The article didn't specifically mention "no NDA" either.
| We've only seen one side of the story here
|
| I don't know if I were the former intern in question
| writing a blog post about this I'd be damn sure to specify
| that there's no NDA or other agreement in place that would
| legally prevent him from doing this.
| darrenoc wrote:
| There's no mention of any NDA, you've just constructed it
| as a straw man.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Non-compete's are not (practically) enforceable in
| California, where repl.it is located.
|
| https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-
| in...
| Exuma wrote:
| I think the CEO is absolutely nuts here.
|
| With that said, I also think certain employees though have a
| very slippery mentality of this sort of vibe where they do
| things that might be sketchy or on the borderline not OK (but
| JUST on the line), and then rationalize as "but ... reason!".
| The tone of this whole article is very subtly reminiscent of
| that... the type of person that when given an inch will take 10
| inches (not even a mile, not that severe), and always do it
| under the guise of many bullet points and being nice, like this
| article... but the undertones are there that they're really
| trying to push the boundary.
|
| That's my unsolicited .02
| thecupisblue wrote:
| The tone here is "uhhh, I did this thing and it turns out it
| might be bad but I dont think so". Tbh, the tone he kept here
| is quite well mannered comparing to the situation at hand.
|
| The vibe is more about a person being excited for doing
| something cool with tech and a company where they interned
| (not worked, interned!) feeling threatened because it crosses
| into their domain. If "let's see what else can I maake with
| this" is an offense, then to hell I'll throw my lightbulbs
| away.
| Exuma wrote:
| I understand your perspective.
|
| What do you make of the comment about "hardest intern we've
| ever worked with."
|
| I understand the CEO is feeling very emotional and is
| clearly manipulating/exaggerating, but I would imagine he
| wouldn't say this if it were entirely 100% fabricated.
|
| Do you believe any part of that statement might be true?
| jc4p wrote:
| Why would they offer him a job right before saying that?
| Some of it could be true, absolutely, but it seems more
| emotionally manipulative than anything else, to me. The
| CEO was mad so he said something.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > Why would they offer him a job right before saying
| that?
|
| A few people have mentioned that on this thread, but I
| don't think it's in sync with the reality of how
| incredibly hard it is to hire technical talent right now,
| esp talent that knows your systems well.
|
| It's entirely possible for someone to be the most
| demanding intern a co has ever had and still be a great
| hire; hell, it might even be _correlated_. Interns
| usually haven't figured out workplace norms yet, and
| combining that with being smart and driven could easily
| yield good-faith behavior that nevertheless is
| "demanding" (for example, asking lots of questions about
| tasks he's given, asking for guidance with parts of the
| system he's not working on, etc etc). In that case, I
| would absolutely want to hire that intern, with the
| understanding that he'd need to get better at the
| cultural aspects of the job once he joined full-time (as
| all intern conversions do).
|
| That being said, no question that it was a bizarre and
| immature thing for the CEO to bring up, and I don't
| disagree with your characterization of it as "emotionally
| manipulative".
| Exuma wrote:
| I'm looking at this from the perspective of "is the
| emotion/frustration felt by the CEO valid". In other
| words, did this open source author actually do ANYTHING
| which could cause frustration in a previous employer. An
| important part of that is whether they were actually a
| 50% pain in the ass employee who repeatedly was pushy
| (but still perhaps is hireable because they were net
| positive)
|
| I'm disregarding any commentary on actual action taken by
| the CEO, because as I said I think it's incredibly stupid
| and immature.
|
| This reply below by @treis is a good explanation of how i
| feel about the answer to your question.
|
| > Lots of CEOs/Owners will definitely be salty about
| that. And they're not totally wrong to feel that way. You
| pay someone a bunch of money only to watch them walk and
| help your competitor take your market share. It's
| understandable why that's upsetting. But they should have
| the maturity to understand that's how the world works and
| not throw a tantrum.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _...but I would imagine he wouldn 't say this if it
| were entirely 100% fabricated._"
|
| How many of the CEO class have you interacted with? This
| is approximately Step 3 in the psychology: "OMG, I have
| to convince myself and the rest of the world that this
| person is not only wrong but also bad." He likely spent
| several minutes rehearsing the comment before writing.
| (No, really, I've sat there and watched someone repeat
| similar comments before a meeting, to make sure they
| believed it enough to be convincing.)
| mindslight wrote:
| I agree about the tone, but I think it comes from youthful
| inexperience and a lack of (legal) knowledge. OP has no idea
| where the line is, what the lines are, or what professional
| legal defense would actually require/entail. And so they're
| stuck trying to rationalize every possibly-defensible point
| in the court of public opinion.
|
| Also, a good way to get employees that aren't testing
| boundaries is to hire experienced developers rather than
| interns who are still learning the world.
|
| Overall I don't see what leg repl.it has to stand on here -
| their product relies on taking numerous free software
| packages and bundling them into proprietary software, and yet
| they have the gall to consider _button placement_ some secret
| sauce?! But it also depends on what OP 's employment contract
| says and when he actually developed this. Altogether, this
| really just looks like a case of a CEO personally bullying
| someone else because they can.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| What boundary do you think they pushed though? I understand
| the sentiment in general, but I didn't get it here at all
| because I can't see anything wrong, bad or questionable that
| OP did.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| The author's excuses about "not intended to compete" or
| "it's free and open-source" (paraphrasing) aren't relevant
| when it comes to whether he stole anything or is competing.
| That said, the CEO is out of line IMO.
| Exuma wrote:
| The area that seemed gray here particularly was the
| "internal decisions part." As someone who has designed
| maybe... 40+ interfaces, I know the tremendous amount of
| effort and thought that goes into the simple placement of a
| button being on the left or the right, with huge impacts to
| usability and user experience.
|
| So when he posts a few images of other sites that "look"
| similar, I don't quite buy the fact that he didn't
| liberally borrow from the many hours of decisions by Repli.
| Thats purely a guess though, and I could absolutely be
| wrong.
|
| I would imagine it would be easy for the author to
| rationalize it in his head that "well, lots of other sites
| have a button in the top row I can do it too!" and in
| effect, ends up copying a lot of Replit features without
| innovating on them simply because other sites "look
| similar"
|
| I picture myself as a CEO seeing a previous employee with
| something that is very clearly using a lot of the decisions
| we worked out together, and then see a list of 20 bullet
| points trying to rationalize why it's ok, that would be
| super irritating to me, but that would be the limit of it.
| Definitely not worthy of anything more than a polite
| conversation, that's for sure.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Assume I am an employee. Assume I take a year or two of
| these internal decisions during my tenure at an org to my
| next employer. Would you be equally upset that my work
| experience was used elsewhere? Where is the line between
| your trade secret and my hard earned work experience?
|
| Because that's what work experience is: showing future
| employers where not to make mistakes that were previously
| learned in the course of work. That knowledge (that has a
| half life) is part of my compensation, arguably the most
| valuable of my total comp.
| Exuma wrote:
| That wouldn't upset me because that is simply knowledge
| not implementation.
|
| As I said in the other reply, my post is at an
| emotional/personal level (as an owner/creator and also
| employer), not necessarily a legal or more political one.
| On that basis i 100% side with the author here.
|
| I was merely saying this situation definitely smells like
| one where there's more to the story than "big bad replit
| picking on poor innocent open source guy". Just the tone
| of his writing seems, and the "one of most difficult
| interns" gives me gut reaction that he might actually be
| someone who tries to be pushy while being nice.
| ctvo wrote:
| > Just the tone of his writing seems, and the "one of
| most difficult interns" gives me gut reaction that he
| might actually be someone who tries to be pushy while
| being nice.
|
| You took a single sentence out of an entire article with
| plenty of other supporting evidence to construct a
| reality where someone in a similar position as you would
| have cover.
|
| It's extraordinary.
| Exuma wrote:
| You're acting as if my reaction is based on one sentence.
| It's most certainly not. I read the entire post, looked
| at all the screenshots, looked between the lines of the
| words, looked at the emotion behind why/what is being
| said.
|
| My current "constructed reality" is that the author built
| something in a very short time, likely liberally re-using
| design decisions from his previous employer. And that the
| CEO, who is a douche, got emotionally upset over this,
| probably from his perspective/shared history which is
| something NO ONE ON HN CAN SEE, and there's likely more
| to the story. Emotionally I can understand why this might
| upset Replit CEO. One can be frustrated, while still
| being mature enough to not let it affect action, and
| certainly not threatening to sue or any of that.
|
| HN is so black and white sometimes it's painful. Just
| because I can relate emotionally to one person being
| frustrated, doesn't suddenly mean I fully support all
| their actions or live in some fantasy land tiny projects
| should be sued for exaggerated claims
| cycomanic wrote:
| He interned during a summer at repl.it 2 years ago. So
| even if he took some results of internal discussion on
| how to place buttons on the website, this is not like
| they had a cure for cancer.
| treis wrote:
| Lots of CEOs/Owners will definitely be salty about that.
| And they're not totally wrong to feel that way. You pay
| someone a bunch of money only to watch them walk and help
| your competitor take your market share. It's
| understandable why that's upsetting. But they should have
| the maturity to understand that's how the world works and
| not throw a tantrum.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's almost entirely within the employer's power to make
| it worthwhile for key employees to not leave for their
| competitors.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _You pay someone a bunch of money only to watch them
| walk and help your competitor take your market share. It
| 's understandable why that's upsetting._
|
| No, it really isn't because that's how business works.
| This is like getting upset that my plumber might fix my
| competitors' pipes, too.
| Exuma wrote:
| Being upset about something and acting on it are 2 very
| different things.
|
| I don't know many people who would not be upset about
| investing many hours into something only to have someone
| copy it in 24 hour period and repost it with only slight
| modifications as theirs.
|
| Acting on that, however, is a very different story. If
| someone is going to act on such emotions they shouldn't
| be a CEO to begin with probably.
| pests wrote:
| If someone invested "many hours" into something for it
| just to be copied in 24 hours - maybe not the best idea.
| [deleted]
| treis wrote:
| That's not at all an analogous situation
| heavyset_go wrote:
| A truly analogous situation would be the CEO of Repl.it
| working on Codeacademy Labs as an employee, a similar
| product to Repl.it, before leaving and launching Repl.it
| itself, which is what happened.
| cmorgan31 wrote:
| Yeah and well you don't act petty and unprofessional as
| the CEO of any company. Tech does not get a pass on it. I
| fully enjoy watching an intern evoke this level of
| response from a well funded CEO. I was employee #1 for a
| start up still in business so I know how they can be your
| 'baby' but give me a break on this one... the CEO
| literally is projecting what he himself did onto this
| intern.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| If you ever move between two big tech firms, they'll sit
| you down in a room with a lawyer who clarifies exactly
| where that line is.
|
| IANAL, but roughly, general knowledge is ok, but specific
| results aren't. If you were party to user research
| findings at company A, it's likely against your NDA to
| tell company B "we should do X" based on the remembered
| outcome of that research.
| foolinaround wrote:
| this is precisely why companies poach employees from
| their competitors...
| ww520 wrote:
| But the UI is public. Did Replit copyright or patent the
| UI design?
| Exuma wrote:
| I'm not saying anything on legal basis. I'm saying simply
| emotionally, the perspective of someone using something I
| have designed, regardless of patent, after we work
| together... that would be a negative situation for me.
|
| That's on a personal level, which is why I said "its
| worth nothing more than a polite conversation"
|
| I think the CEO is an absolute knob jockey for
| threatening to sue. That's ludicrous to me.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| > I think the CEO is an absolute knob jockey for
| threatening to sue.
|
| "knob jockey"? WTF? Why would you comment on what you
| think the CEO's sexuality is in this context? That's
| awful and seems really out of place here.
| beckler wrote:
| Copyright doesn't really apply to UI designs.
|
| Patents can apply, but it's really only used in novel and
| unique situations. Even if Replit had a patient on its
| UI/UX design, if you were able to find evidence of prior
| art, you could petition to invalidate.
| [deleted]
| rdudekul wrote:
| Amjad the CEO of Replit could be fairly insecure person afraid
| of losing his company's dominance/marketshare to some simple
| intern/developer. I am sure he did NOT expect this level of
| heat.
|
| This article and the associated 'press' could serve as a text-
| book case for insecure start-up CXOs.
| [deleted]
| JoeOfTexas wrote:
| I mean, making a whole blog post about the situation, and
| then making the top post of hacker news, just kind of keeps
| the sniper scope of lawyers pointed at himself.
| cmorgan31 wrote:
| The intern? Yeah he's fine. There's no real consequence for
| that person other than proving he's a capable employee who
| can be a bit obsessive. They should work in a tangentially
| related area of product for awhile and forget it ever
| happened. Technical hires who can implement your idea is
| much more valuable in bulk than ideas themselves.
| thinkloop wrote:
| I wonder, people always reference the Streisand Effect, but
| for every one of those there are a thousand complaints that
| go quietly heeded.
| williamtwild wrote:
| I have met many "CEO"s of a 5 person company so they were CEO
| by title and not by wright.
| vidarh wrote:
| I mean, this was a marketing opportunity. They could've asked
| nicely if he'd be willing to link to repl.it for anyone who
| wants something more solid and scalable. It sounds from the
| early e-mails as if OP started out very positively predisposed
| towards them.
|
| Instead they've now broadcast to their potential customer base
| that they're litigious and petty.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| > they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that
| they're litigious and petty.
|
| This will indeed the case, and I'll personally won't be
| recommending them anymore. If they're so petty to threaten to
| sue some intern, they're not worth doing business with.
| zamalek wrote:
| > litigious and petty
|
| The unfortunate truth is that this doesn't matter. Oracle, as
| one recent example, is still wildly successful - even in the
| open source space.
| imglorp wrote:
| Yep it's a very small step from suing a friendly collaborator
| to suing a customer. Ask Oracle.
| tedivm wrote:
| This is a great point- there were a ton of ways that this
| could have been handled that would have left all parties
| happy and better off, but the CEO went directly for the
| lawyer power play.
| ljm wrote:
| The lawyer powerplay _and_ also disparaging the OP by
| calling them a difficult intern.
|
| I could give the legal peacocking a pass. It's a weird
| flex, a bit too much ego really, but sure, I don't care if
| your daddy is cooler than my daddy.
|
| Punching down at your intern though, as a CEO? Jeez, talk
| about poor leadership. I would not work for that man.
| [deleted]
| normac2 wrote:
| I'm on a job search, and Replit is one of the places I was going
| to apply, off of their listings on HN Who is Hiring?. So much for
| that, and I suspect a lot of devs are going to feel the same. (I
| don't think I'm good enough to get in, but there're a lot of
| really good devs who read HN who are.) In a seller's market for
| developers, this could hurt them in the form of less good talent
| applying.
|
| That said, my gut feeling as an outsider is that they feel
| genuinely burnt by a former employee making something similar to
| their product. Not just cynically trying to smash the
| competition. Not that that justifies anything--everyone _thinks_
| they 're the good guy (well, almost everyone).
| cwkoss wrote:
| Would it be against HN's rules to reply to Who's Hiring posts
| from Replit with a link to this article?
| addison-lee wrote:
| I don't see how it would be especially if you pair it with a
| questionable asking if they treat all former employees like
| this.
| dang wrote:
| Yes, it would be against the rules at the top of the Who Is
| Hiring threads.
|
| We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is
| involved [1]. That's why the OP has been at #1 all day -
| normally we downweight indignation posts at least a little,
| to compensate for the default tendency to massively upvote
| them, but we haven't touched this thread in any way. I don't
| think we'd take that so far as to selectively turn off the
| Who Is Hiring rules, though. It would set a confusing
| precedent.
|
| [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false
| &qu...
| cwkoss wrote:
| Thanks for the reply - I definitely won't then. I didn't
| realize replit was a YC company, and understand the value
| in keeping Who's Hiring threads clean from criticism -
| could lead to interesting discussion but at the expense of
| distracting from the purpose of the thread.
| swyx wrote:
| im very glad that negative coverage of a YC startup is so
| highly upvoted on HN. we still only have your word for it,
| but thank you for doing what you can to err on the side of
| caution when it comes to YC startups.
| mmastrac wrote:
| It would likely go against the spirit of the community to
| hound a job posting like that. I don't disagree with the
| sentiment, but turning the hiring posts into any sort of
| flamewar/off-topic discussion dilutes the value of those
| threads.
| lynxaegon wrote:
| I do think it should be allowed to post the link of a
| related thread. If I see the hiring post on HN, I would
| like to know more about that company. It's true that I
| would search the company to find out more about them, but
| it would be easier to just scroll a bit and find a few
| threads about them.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I disagree: If a company posts a job on HN, it is 100%
| reasonable to point out to the community that working there
| can come back to bite you.
| version_five wrote:
| That kind of behavior is what has ruined most social
| media. The job post threads are great because they are
| strictly about job posts. They would be much worse if
| they also included random color commentary. Everyone
| using this site knows how to research a company. There is
| literally no upside and a huge downside to what you're
| advocating.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I can see how allowing this could discourage companies
| from posting in these threads. I think it would be
| interesting to see how a hiring thread including
| criticism would play out, but appreciate that it would
| also likely invite a lot of flame wars, astroturfing and
| unproductive bickering.
|
| A (different) jobs board where the companies posting the
| jobs do not have control of the comment discussion would
| be interesting to see - but would need a monetization
| strategy that ensures it can survive without turning into
| pay-to-censor junky platforms like Yelp or Glassdoor.
| vecinu wrote:
| Not only am I not interested in working for repl.it but I have
| asked my org to never pay for their products due to this
| behavior, we should not reward it and money has the loudest
| voice.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > That said, my gut feeling as an outsider is that they feel
| genuinely burnt by a former employee making something similar
| to their product. Not just cynically trying to smash the
| competition. Not that that justifies anything--everyone thinks
| they're the good guy (well, almost everyone).
|
| Agreed, I think it's totally fair for the CEO to be a little
| peeved by the project, and the complaint is about how horrible
| his handling of it was. This is exacerbated by how unfailingly
| polite and professional the ex-intern is in the (presumably)
| unabridged email thread.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| which is hilarious given that the CEO of repl.it is literally
| building something similar to a product that he worked on at
| codeacademy
| tyingq wrote:
| This is the absolute best part of this. Re-read his snarky
| language now knowing this and it's just...funny.
| mmastrac wrote:
| It's very easy to justify doing something to benefit
| yourself while writing it off as justified, and getting
| massively offended when someone does the same thing to your
| perceived detriment.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The irony here is delicious.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Replit's to be a new-age cloud company (ala fly.io) rather
| than Lynda.com for code. At least, thats what I gather from
| its founder's posts on Twitter.
| prezjordan wrote:
| 2011: https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-
| codeca...
| contriban wrote:
| Can you add more context? Why did you post this?
| caslon wrote:
| It demonstrates that he did something _worse_ than what he 's
| accusing his former intern of doing:
|
| _Second, we're also excited to announce one of the first (of
| many!) projects that Amjad has worked on with us: Codecademy
| Labs, the easiest way to play with JavaScript, Ruby, and
| Python online. Now, after you learn with Codecademy courses,
| you can use Codecademy Labs to create your own programs,
| share them via Twitter and Facebook, and show your friends
| what you've learned._
|
| Unlike Radon, he commercialized his "clone."
|
| It doesn't matter morally that he cloned what his previous
| employer did (and it's hard to argue that Radon's tool is a
| clone to begin with, not that there would be anything morally
| wrong with it), but it does highlight his hypocrisy.
| lwb wrote:
| Tbf, he made the first version of Replit as an open source
| project before joining Codecademy, and it's likely that
| retaining ownership of that project was part of his
| employment contract.
| underwater wrote:
| Amjad was one of the first engineers at Coder Academy. It's
| quite possible that that project was his baby, not just
| something he happened to work on.
|
| He also spent 3 years at Facebook between Coder and
| Repl.it, so it's not like he walked out the door with the
| idea.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| CEO has probably brought the Streisand Effect on himself. Any
| investor doing DD will find this apparently popular article the
| corresponding pile of comments on HN pointing out how trivial,
| unoriginal and un-innovative repl.it really is.
| tommoor wrote:
| > we're also excited to announce one of the first (of many!)
| projects that Amjad has worked on with us: Codecademy Labs, the
| easiest way to play with JavaScript, Ruby, and Python online
|
| I'll just leave this here so we can all bask in the insane
| hypocrisy of this entire episode.
|
| https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca...
| amasad wrote:
| That was a clone of Replit that we made work at Codecademy. I
| started working on Replit (or repl.it) back when I was a
| student in Jordan. I didn't have a laptop so every time I
| wanted to get some programming done I had to setup a
| development environment at the university or at work. The idea
| for Replit was when you needed a repl to do some coding you
| should easily get one from anywhere including a mobile device.
| I thought it would benefit many people, especially those who
| don't have the means to buy expensive computers.
|
| It took 2 years of work to get something working and in 2011 we
| launched on HN (2011 web archive snapshot here
| https://web.archive.org/web/20111007050930/http://repl.it/ and
| HN launch here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3056490).
| It was the first of its kind and it inspired a lot of projects
| and still does today. It was totally open-source
| (https://github.com/replit-archive/repl.it) and after the
| launch it was used as infrastructure by Codecademy (which later
| employed) and Udacity and many others to deliver interactive
| coding in the browser. I was thrilled about that.
|
| Now, a lot of people implicitly assume that in a dispute
| between for-profit company and an open-source project, the for-
| profit company must be in the wrong. But there is some line
| that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's
| product (if you don't believe that, you can stop reading now,
| because no argument will convince you) and I think to someone
| who knew Replit's architecture well, this project would clearly
| be across it. It copied even unique, invisible aspects of
| Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws. That's the
| hallmark of copying versus merely writing one's own program to
| solve the same problem.
| simonhamp wrote:
| Cheaters always watching over their shoulder. How can you trust
| people if you know they can't trust you? Or worse, you can't
| trust yourself!
| raslah wrote:
| Well there's a plot twist.
|
| Kind of explains the weirdness of the reaction to what amounts
| to a typical side project. Replit isnt even that innovative of
| an idea, who would think someone's ripping it off? Well
| obviously someone who already ripped it off.
| ahmedalsudani wrote:
| Hah. Good find. No wonder he's paranoid about a weekend project
| :)
| ivan888 wrote:
| To be fair, you can see that the README of the jq-console
| project that was mentioned in this article had a reference to
| what seems to be the predecessor of repl.it months prior to the
| publication of this article: https://github.com/replit-
| archive/jq-console/blame/7c0b9ffa8...
|
| However... the irony is still hilarious, and this in no way
| excuses Amjad's emails
| PhineasRex wrote:
| This explains a lot of why he's so threatened by this random
| POC. He's projecting onto the author the exact thing that he
| did.
| neweggrma wrote:
| I mean... of course it is.
|
| Someone could (and likely is) building a better Repl.it with
| Nix and Theia. It's fucking flabbergasting to me that
| everyone in this thread acts like Repl.it is some magical
| product.
|
| And that's not even accounting for the half-dozen other
| production-quality VS-Code-in-browser projects.
|
| Sorry, it's just not a unique space. Not surprising at an
| that an egostistic founder isn't handling it well.
| [deleted]
| orliesaurus wrote:
| That's really shitty. I wonder what the founders of Replit have
| to say about this? They're active on HN so I hope they can
| address this publicly...
|
| EDIT: I mean the screenshots are irrefutable evidence of how bad
| this has escalated - it started as a normal convo and went
| downwards like the CEO was out to get some blood for no reason
| ... now I guess you're gonna get a lawyer threat letter to take
| down the whole blogpost because you've revealed private
| conversations without both parties' consent?
| FiloSottile wrote:
| > now I guess you're gonna get a lawyer threat letter to take
| down the whole blogpost because you've revealed private
| conversations without both parties' consent?
|
| Absent any NDA or other contract, there is nothing requiring
| the other party's consent to publish correspondence in the US.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| What about option 3) here [1] - this email was initiated by
| Replit's CEO - so publishing the original email is...bad? [1]
| https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/is-it-legal-
| to-...
| stonogo wrote:
| What is option 3? Nobody numbered anything. If you're
| talking about copyright, this is obviously fair use.
| jll29 wrote:
| +1
|
| Finally someone raising the valid point about "it all depends
| on the legal paperwork signed."
| shkkmo wrote:
| How would an NDA cover corrospondence with an intern from 2
| years ago?
| ivanstame wrote:
| It wouldn't
| thefunnyman wrote:
| Their silence on this matter speaks volumes. I've seen the
| Replit founders comment on just about every other HN post that
| pops up regarding their company so it's quite surprising that
| they've made no comment here. Very curious to hear the other
| side of the story if there is one.
| fhrow4484 wrote:
| Here's a glimpse of the other side of the story, a reply from
| the CEO a few min ago:
| https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369?s=19
| brb3 wrote:
| He's implying here that Radon used source code from replit.
| That's a pretty big claim to make, I'm curious if that's
| the case.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| The post is ambiguous, as "copying it" could also mean
| "copying the feature after seeing our code".
| sonotathrowaway wrote:
| > As a matter of principle, when someone goes into your
| home and steals from you, even if it's not material, you
| have to respond.
|
| That sounds like a a disingenuous way of admitting that
| he knows he's lying.
| jjeaff wrote:
| What if you invite them into your home and then 2 years
| later, you see that they have decorated their house with
| obvious inspiration from your own home decor?
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| What are you protecting? Your genius-level decorating
| insights which are so incomprehensibly deep their
| discovery should be guarded with your life but could
| inexplicably be copied by a total n00b in 5 minutes?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If that's what it means, well, seeing the code two years
| ago is a total non-issue where the setup is so basic and
| the majority of languages are new ones.
|
| But your interpretation seems way too generous when he
| compares it to going into your house and stealing from
| you.
| shkkmo wrote:
| That doesn't seem to make replit look any better.
|
| > There is a difference between copying a feature and
| actually getting intro a contract, and access to the code,
| copying it and calling it open-source.
|
| > As a matter of principle, when someone goes into your
| home and steals from you, even if it's not material, you
| have to respond.
|
| EDIT: Added quote. The implication seems to be that he
| thinks source code was stolen and this has nothing to do
| with design.
| jeanloolz wrote:
| > copying it
|
| "it" could refers to the feature, not the code. That
| sentence is clearly ambiguous, the meaning slightly
| change based on what it refers to.
| shkkmo wrote:
| You are correct, "it" could refer to a feature in the
| first instance in that sentence, but probably not the
| second instance (since we don't usually talk about making
| a feature open source.)
|
| The most coherent interpretation of that sentence is that
| "it" refers to code in both instances. However, the
| intent of a sentence is not always the same as it's most
| coherent interpretation and "it" misuse is a frequent
| cause of unintentional ambiguity. (That's why I qualified
| my statement with the "implication seems to be"
| language.)
| thefunnyman wrote:
| I tend to agree. It seems like the author of the article
| already addressed this accusation [0]. I admittedly am
| biased in favor of OSS authors but I tend to agree with
| the points he made there. Namely, this product doesn't
| clone any design decisions that aren't already public.
| More importantly, Replits differentiator isn't the
| ability to run code in browser (which tons of other
| projects already offer), it's the polish and support that
| comes with scaling that idea.
|
| [0] https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/#is-
| replit-rig...
| pbecotte wrote:
| I...am on the side of the company here? wierd...
|
| An employee of a company left, and then made an open source clone
| of the company's software. The fact that the software was easy to
| clone or that others had done it previously doesn't seem really
| relevant. Several times I have left a company, and I could
| replicate a good percentage of it in a couple days too, not
| because it was easy, but because the months/years of experience I
| had building it the first time.
|
| Whipping out the lawyers and bragging about his funding is
| idiotic and childish, but I think asking for the project to be
| taken down is completely reasonable. (on that note- I kind of
| think at this point that you have to be a megalomaniac to be a
| funded startup founder)
| trevor-e wrote:
| I'm with you on this, reading the article I can't help but
| think the author is being intentionally naive about the
| situation and feelings on both sides. If anything, to me this
| reads like viral marketing to get the project off the ground.
|
| The author builds a clone of a product for a former company,
| shares the project with the CEO, and expects them to be happy
| with it? And "out of nowhere" they are suddenly displeased with
| the project and (rightfully IMO) feel like some of it was
| copied from their business. What universe does this person live
| in? It's a fair point that several other competitors copy the
| UI and I'm not suggesting this is illegal or disallowed, just
| that there's a huge lack of common sense to think a former
| company would be happy to see a project like this.
|
| The author is digging a further hole by making all this public,
| it's not a good look IMO. I'm all for competition but there's a
| severe lack of tact here.
| CRConrad wrote:
| > If anything, to me this reads like viral marketing to get
| the project off the ground.
|
| That's assuming it is a "project" to "get off the ground" in
| the first place. What gave you the impression that this was
| something the author was going to try and take commercial? I
| never got that impression.
|
| > It's a fair point that several other competitors copy the
| UI and I'm not suggesting this is illegal or disallowed
|
| But you are suggesting it was that way around. I didn't quite
| see that either; on the contrary, I got a kind of distinct
| impression that some of these other projects predate Replit,
| including its UI design.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Bad take. It's not a clone, for the reasons explained in the
| article. It's more akin to the multitude of "run code online"
| sites that already existed before Replit was started.
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| If the intern was pursuing this project as a business, then I
| could sympathize with legal threats. But this is clearly a
| passion project. Why make such a big fuss over a side project?
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| And it's not even a pioneering idea from Replit
| dragandj wrote:
| Why? Assuming that there isn't a non-compete signed by the
| former employee, the (former) employee has the right to use all
| their skills and knowledge to do whatever they want on the free
| market.
| pbecotte wrote:
| This wouldn't be an issue of non-compete, but of intellectual
| property - and I can't imagine there was no intellectual
| property agreement signed. I've never had a job that didn't
| have one...
| dragandj wrote:
| General ideas (such as most of repl.it stuff) isn't covered
| by IP. I doubt that the (former) employee copied exact code
| in this case. It seems to me that he re-implemented some
| vaguely similar functionality. Moreover, most of that stuff
| existed before repl.it...
| treesprite82 wrote:
| If the project is "no more similar to Replit than the 15 other
| (commercial!) ones you can find on Google by searching "run
| python online" or "online programming environment"." and uses
| none of Replit's internal design decisions, then I don't think
| it's fair to call it a clone.
|
| I am just taking the author at their word though. Could turn
| out that they copy-pasted large chunks of non-FOSS code from
| Replit or something.
| pbecotte wrote:
| The emails from the company make it clear that at least one
| party to the dispute believed that they did use Replit's
| internal design decisions. Commercial companies approaching
| the same problem certainly would offer similar feature sets.
| But an employee reading the source code and then starting a
| git repo that makes a working version of the product freely
| available is a pretty big deal. It doesn't have to be copy-
| pasted to be valuable intellectual property. (though, I do
| agree that THIS was unlikely to actually be valuable IP haha)
| paxys wrote:
| The knowledge of something in your head belongs to you, not a
| previous employer. Silicon Valley was founded and continues to
| flourish because employees at large companies go "I can do this
| better myself", and there is absolutely nothing wrong with
| that.
| kumarm wrote:
| I think you are right on point and project should be taken
| down.
|
| Both acted childish. One being an intern is understandable,
| Replit CEO should have acted little more mature.
| brianberns wrote:
| Unless I'm misunderstanding something, the company's software
| is already open source (https://github.com/replit), so cloning
| it is perfectly reasonable.
|
| If there's any dispute here, I think it would be over the
| copyright to the cloned code (if it really is a clone), but the
| article doesn't mention anything about that, so I suspect it
| isn't actually cloned at all.
| pbecotte wrote:
| Just because a company has SOME open source software,
| probably doesn't mean that all of their software is.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| But the point is, it's not an open source clone of anything
| proprietary. Their proprietary stuff is the collaborative
| capability they have added, accounts, sharing, etc. The stuff
| the intern replicated is a bunch of non-proprietary open source
| stuff (that they themselves open sourced), and he went well
| beyond what replit does by supporting hundreds of languages.
| They have zero chance legally of going anywhere with this other
| than scaring a small project out of existence. There is no
| case.
| burnished wrote:
| I hear you, but I'm curious about why the response of legal
| threats weighs less heavily on your heart than anything else
| here? That seems like a big deal and probably the biggest deal
| here.
|
| I mean, can you imagine a world where the email was "Hey that
| is great work, but I'm worried this is stepping on our toes a
| little. Can you take that project down?".
|
| And then honestly the more I think about it the "why dont we
| offer you a job!" -> "most difficult intern we had" (note:
| quotes not intended to imply literal quote here) is really
| troubling.
| pbecotte wrote:
| Yeah, I'm all on board with trashing the company. Those
| emails were terrible.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Sigh. Now @pg will stop retweeting random Replit success stories.
| sabhiram wrote:
| This is funny. They literally do nothing but copy existing
| workflows and jam it into a "webapp", who really is the copycat?
|
| I say you use this exposure to actually build a Lyft to their
| Uber. Show them who is really boss.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I'm surprised anyone would invest in this technology when
| Microsoft has made it pretty clear they're going to dominate this
| space with https://github.com/features/codespaces
| 6510 wrote:
| I'm not 100% sure but I think you can't kill open-source projects
| even if you wanted to. It seems that after releasing something
| into the wild its up to other people? A court case [it seems]
| could at best limit use to IP holders?
| smashah wrote:
| This is insane behavior. OP shared something they were proud of
| to what seemed to be a mentor and then Amjad threatens OP? Damn!
| I was about to raise VC funding for legal protection from giants
| and this petty fool is swinging his schlong at his own ex intern?
| Wow.
| domrdy wrote:
| Interesting, I've wondered why you've taken it down! Your project
| was such a great help dealing with monaco-language-server, and I
| was really sad when it just vanished off of Github one day.
| Havoc wrote:
| I guess I'm not trying replit
| [deleted]
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Because of Amjad Masad's words and actions, I won't be using
| Repl.it or anything Masad touches at all. I'll recommend the same
| to friends and colleagues, as well.
| [deleted]
| tombert wrote:
| I love how companies just assume that they own everything you do
| even remotely similar to something they work on, even _after_ you
| leave.
|
| Let's assume that this person _did_ just copy the replit design
| (which I don 't believe they did), so what? If it was able to be
| "cloned" in a weekend or two, clearly it wouldn't really be
| sufficient to take down replit, so it seems that the CEO of
| replit just thinks that if you've ever worked for their company,
| any time you work on any kind of vaguely-similar REPL software,
| you should be taken down.
|
| It's not like this is unique; corporations just seem to
| immediately assume that anything you did after seeing their
| brilliant and elegant code must be the reason for your success.
| Mulpze15 wrote:
| What if it was a purposeful Streisand effect, if we would assume
| there is not such thing as bad publicity.
|
| I bully a lone open source dev, everybody get fired up, I go
| front page HN, maybe as the bad guy, but now people hear about
| me, and total sign-up increase.
|
| Would be devilish, maybe would work?
| aritmo wrote:
| Perhaps in another dimension.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Replit's CEO: "I owe my entire career to open-source"
|
| Copy, paste, threaten with lawsuit?
|
| => new product ready to launch
|
| All big three cloud providers monetize other people's open source
| projects by renting out hosted versions. Apparently, that's OK
| and highly profitable. So why look down on a startup CEO
| attempting to replicate the cloud success story?
| cjv wrote:
| https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401617251464138754
|
| Unbelievable and shameless.
| ezekg wrote:
| The fact that Amjad did this exact thing to Codecademy [0]
| makes it even more baffling.
|
| [0]: https://twitter.com/will_ye_/status/1402016586953678848
| mpeg wrote:
| Poor form by the repl.it CEO here, bullying a junior employee to
| take their weekend project down.
|
| If your product is threatened by this, it's probably not a very
| good product.
|
| I've used Repl.it multiplayer to interview candidates in the
| past, will probably look for an alternative in the future. If
| anyone knows of one that supports non-web languages (I already
| use codesandbox for frontend) like python, etc. this is the
| chance to pitch it.
| no_time wrote:
| > If anyone knows of one that supports non-web languages (I
| already use codesandbox for frontend) like python, etc. this is
| the chance to pitch it.
|
| How about a locally hosted lxc container running nothing but
| sshd, tmux (to share a single tty), nano and whatever
| compiler/interpreter you need? If you want to get real fancy
| and edit the same file, kakoune has a collaborative editing
| feature.
|
| I might not value my time enough but right now I really don't
| get the value proposition of 70% of saas businesses trending
| here.
| belval wrote:
| From the comments I know that this will not be a popular reply,
| but I do feel like he crossed a line by reproducing something he
| worked on commercially even if he had no intent of selling it.
| While everyone is rightfully astonished by the CEO unprofessional
| tone (and I really don't condone it), he did see the design
| documents, technical specs, and whatnot.
| stuaxo wrote:
| The threats seem directly at odds with the CEOs tweet here
| https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401617251464138754
|
| This whole saga is pretty sad really.
|
| While replit isn't doing very much in wrapping these languages in
| a frontend (and something that is clearly straightforward to
| replicate), they are doing all the work that comes with scaling
| that to many users on the web (I guess that includes moderation).
|
| They should have just been happy with that.
|
| It takes more than just being able to run all the languages in
| sandboxes to compete - if you tried this, people would be mining
| bitcoin and hosting all sorts of awful stuff.
|
| Really strange / insecure attitude.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Plenty of people are pleasant in public and shitty in private.
| randompwd wrote:
| My guess would be more the available source rather than the
| website itself. I think it's fair to say somebody who interned
| at a place would have had things explained to them and had
| access to internal design docs which the intern themselves
| wouldnt necessarily have figured out if working from scratch.
|
| I find it very bizarre for an intern to do this.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Replit is about everything surrounding the eval() call. The
| intern's clone, according to them, had nothing of this
| (scaling, user accounts, saving code snippets, ...). If
| they'd rebuilt all that too I'd see the point, but really,
| what great secrets are there in those "design docs" that just
| refer to the part of the service where you put in your code
| and click run? These things have been around for at least a
| decade, this one just seems to have the most languages.
| Dah00n wrote:
| If it is bizarre for an intern then how does it look when
| "employee #1 of Code Academy" starts Repl.it right after
| working on the same kind of thing there? This smells like
| someone who saw himself in the intern and disliked it.
| [deleted]
| iabacu wrote:
| The difference between what Amjad tweets publicly and what
| Amjad threatens the ex-intern privately is jarring.
|
| That makes me think that either the tweets are empty virtue
| signaling; or Amjad is legit worried that an intern open-source
| project can accidentally outcompete his company!
| threatofrain wrote:
| Of course he's afraid. The CEO Amjad Masad used to work at
| CodeAcademy building interactive up-and-going code
| experiences. Now look where we are -- he has his own company
| with $20M in funding building interactive up-and-going coding
| experiences.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Guys, I don't know what this is about yet, but I know amjad
| (ceo). And I know that whatever is going on here, his intentions
| were pure. He's proven himself to me that he's pretty much the
| opposite of a sleezy corporate ceo who crushes intern side
| projects while twirling his mustache.
|
| I just wanted to encourage everybody to chill on it for a moment
| and wait to see what's up, because my spidey senses are screaming
| "miscommunication / crossed wires" rather than malicious intent,
| for what it's worth.
|
| EDIT: Fuck. https://i.imgur.com/cFYq7Nv.png
|
| I'm going offline for awhile to focus on family matters.
| Evidently, I am not a good judge of character, and I need to stop
| believing in people without _really_ knowing them.
| [deleted]
| Stratoscope wrote:
| You shared in public a screenshot of a private conversation?
| drusepth wrote:
| Uhhhh... side note: you only gave him 5 minutes to respond
| according to those timestamps. Going offline for a bit is
| probably a good idea if only for the passage of time; if I were
| him (especially in a time where shit is hitting the fan), I'd
| want to take some time to think things through before
| responding to anyone, even friends.
| tgv wrote:
| It doesn't scream miscommunication to me. It's of course
| possible to save face claiming that, but they're talking about
| the very same thing, IMO.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| That's correct, and OP himself feared as much. But Amjad
| explicitly refused an offer to uncross those wires. As much as
| the benefit of the doubt should still be given and this may
| indeed just be a miscommunication issue, at that juncture he
| really has no one to blame but himself for this fallout.
| juped wrote:
| Are you aware of how statements like these look to those on the
| outside of whatever particular good old boys club it is you're
| referencing here?
| verall wrote:
| Hey, you might want to chat with him if you know him, since it
| seems like he has a personal issue with "copycats".
|
| I don't think he was twirling a moustache, but it seems like
| the idea of being cloned is very personal to Amjad, and he gets
| emotional about it. You see this both in this exchange and in
| previous tweets about "copycats".
| Mizza wrote:
| When will society learn the lesson that people's goodness and
| "pureness" is based on the actions they take, and not on the
| opinions they hold or the manner they hold in private company.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| In fairness, you're absolutely right. I've even see this play
| out from the other side, where everybody thinks X is pure and
| noble, but X was doing worrisome things when no one was
| looking.
|
| But look at this from an "out of body" perspective for a
| moment. Isn't it just a little convenient that the first
| thing you read, right at the top of that blog post, is also
| the most cartoonishly evil thing? Are you absolutely certain
| that we're not missing some crucial context here? How often
| have we seen this kind of outrage where, later on, it turns
| out that was a lot more complicated than we'd originally
| assumed?
|
| All that said, yes, you're correct. And that's really all
| that matters. But I can think of a few other things that
| might be going on (admittedly, I have to be pretty creative
| to think of something plausible, but they do exist).
|
| I'll keep reading and start asking around. Maybe the
| cartoonishly evil thing is the true thing, but if it's not,
| at least I won't have fallen for it.
|
| (And it it was the true thing, I will be hat in hand with
| apologies. Heck, I'd be the first to bring a pitchfork if
| this was true at face value.)
| neweggrma wrote:
| >Evidently, I am not a good judge of character, and I need to
| stop believing in people without really knowing them.
|
| I seriously hope this sticks with you. I've let a lot of my
| frustration with HN and other social media go when I've
| realized that people _are not good judges of characters of
| others_.
|
| God damn people fall for scams, charlatans and more all the
| time. I spent much of high school frustrated because one of my
| closer friends was just a constant grifter and no one could
| ever see through it despite my innards constantly screaming
| ALERT ALERT ALERT.
|
| STOP GOING TO BAT FOR STRANGERS, FOLKS.
|
| And when people tell you and show you who they are _fucking
| believe them_.
|
| ---
|
| oh man this is the kind of stuff that eats at me. I have a
| better sense of tech than most (adopted Rust, K8s and crypto 3+
| years before they were on anyone's radar), but I also don't
| fall for this shit. Do you not realize how cringe it is to
| watch you fall over yourself for yet another egostistic SV
| megalomaniac.
|
| nothing about replit is that unique either, to hear the way
| y'all jerk off about is... well holy shit no one there's a
| contingency of us still refusing to go back to the industry.
| I'd rather shoot myself.
|
| _Nothing_ about replit is unique. I don 't know how to stress
| that more. Give me $50K and Theia and I could make a MVP that
| apparently stupid VCs would be dying to fund.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| It sure screams of malicious intent. It would take a
| redaction/clarification from the CEO to prove otherwise. But my
| guess is he will try to ignore it and hope the problem goes
| away without too much brand impact. Would love to be wrong
| about that.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The miscommunication angle could have been argued after the
| first emails. But once double downs and legal threats ensue,
| Hanlon's Razor doesn't apply.
| samatman wrote:
| This doesn't look to me like one of those cases where new
| information is going to come to light.
|
| Nor do I want to commit the fundamental attribution error, like
| 80% of this thread. Even though there are a few other people
| offering personal experiences of Amjad rubbing them the wrong
| way. That tends to happen in a thread of this character.
|
| Here's my best guess: your friend had a bad day and fucked up.
| Then he doubled down, and now it's out in the open.
|
| Good news is, this is salvageable. He's not getting MeTooed, he
| didn't embezzle money or steal code. He got paranoid and
| bullied a former intern.
|
| I think a simple apology and some self reflection would go a
| long way here. There will always be a mob which takes that as
| blood in the water, and will say awful things on Twitter. But
| the bulk of the community, the people who matter, will notice,
| and accept it if it's sincere.
| teraflop wrote:
| > I think a simple apology and some self reflection would go
| a long way here.
|
| The CEO is continuing to double down today, more than 2
| months after the original conversation, so I'm not sure
| that's likely:
| https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369
| iabacu wrote:
| This is bizarre.
|
| If the intern did steal code, the CEO only wants the
| project to be taken down?
|
| Any IP agreement worth their salt would _require_ Replit to
| send a formal /legal request asking the intern to destroy
| and return any stolen IP.
|
| So I call bullshit on the CEO, and the intern should
| probably sue Replit for slander.
| gpm wrote:
| > should probably sue Replit for slander.
|
| If the CEO is making the stealing part up (seems likely)
| the intern probably _could_ sue Replit. Intentional
| copyright infringement /trade secret violations are a
| crime and my understanding of US law (not a lawyer) is
| that that makes it actionable regardless of damages.
|
| Should he though? If he wins it seems likely he'll get
| nominal damages. He'll have invested a huge number of
| hours of his life into it. He'll be risking being on the
| hook for some or all of his lawyers fees depend on how
| the judge feels about awarding costs.
|
| It doesn't seem likely to be worth it. Public shaming of
| Replit like this is a very cost effective way of
| punishing Replit... the legal system not so much.
| neweggrma wrote:
| _Why on earth are people acting like this is bizaree_.
|
| Nothing about Repl.it is even remotely unique. And in
| fact, it seems like they're finally catching on (RE:
| their post about Nix).
|
| Nix + Theia + a team of moderately dedicated folks could
| replicate the important parts of Repl.it in a month. I'd
| bet my fucking life on it.
| amjadtwofaced wrote:
| You really don't know him. He's as dishonest and two faced as
| they come.
| efxz wrote:
| Take a minute and read before posting, because you are really
| wrong here buddy...
| wdb wrote:
| Directly threaten a person with a lawsuit without any
| remediation is just wrong.
| cole-k wrote:
| Well, if we want to supply character evidence, I know Radon.
|
| And I believe that not only were his intentions good, but also
| his actions.
|
| Although I would still like to hear Amjad's side of the story.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I just... Amjad has been excellent, and I've never gotten the
| sense he would do something like this. It doesn't even make
| sense for him to worry at all, let alone to send legal
| threats. Replit is at "early google/Microsoft vibes," as pg
| put it. It would be hard for anything to kill replit, unless
| they do it themselves.
|
| I saw this pop up while I was out driving to the gas station,
| but I was so shocked that I wanted to urge caution. Now that
| I'm back, I too will look carefully at all sides. Thank you
| for vouching for Radon -- it helps to know that this isn't
| just someone with a chip on their shoulder making up stories.
|
| Admittedly, if I have to reach for "maybe it's a lie," it's
| not looking great. But the fair thing to do is to wait and
| hear from amjad.
|
| What kind of stuff have you done together? I haven't worked
| directly with Amjad, but some years ago I almost joined, and
| we've since thrown around ideas for how to use ML to build
| some great tooling at replit. He strikes me as extremely
| reasonable, and I've seen him change his mind from talking
| with him. (It wasn't just a technical plan that he changed
| his mind about; it was a tricky social situation thing.) I
| didn't get the sense he would stomp on someone.
|
| I agree it's possible I was off the mark, and if so, I'll
| readjust. But I believe in him. So I won't let myself be
| dragged to a certain judgement without listening to the other
| side of the story first, no matter how bad it looks.
|
| But it's fair if other people don't feel that way. It's just,
| the inside situation often looks much, much different,
| y'know? It's good to wait and see.
| cole-k wrote:
| I can understand now why you would doubt the blog post.
| Radon and I are friends from college, and in my
| approximately five years of knowing him I have no reason to
| believe him ever capable of faking a blog post so he can
| get back at his former employer. He certainly fights for
| what he believes in, though.
|
| I suppose we can only wait to hear what Amjad has to say.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Oh boy.
|
| I don't know you, but I really don't think you're making
| that up. And that means, as a scientist, I now have to
| contend with the new evidence of "a longtime personal
| friend of the author, who seems quite reasonable to me,
| is saying that the blog post should be taken at face
| value."
|
| ...I'll keep asking around. It's not looking good, but
| it's also unfair not to listen to the other side.
|
| Welp. Time to dive in to the details of this post. Fwiw,
| if it's genuine, then I empathize greatly with Radon;
| I've been in a similar situation, where I wanted to build
| a business but decided against it due to vague threats. I
| can only imagine what it'd be like to have the threat of
| sic'ing YC's extremely well-paid lawyers on your ass to
| hunt for any small violation of your employment terms
| that they can leverage legally.
|
| Ugh. It just sounds so frickin' cartoonishly evil that
| I'm having trouble even forcing myself to admit it's
| possible. But I do admit it's possible.
|
| Can I ask, have you spoken with Radon about this? Did you
| get the impression that there might be some details
| omitted, or ... anything? Something other than the
| cartoonish evil story that I'm being asked to accept as
| true.
|
| (I admit I'm reaching pretty far with this line of
| thinking, but, it's _possible_ that there was some
| crucial context omitted from the post. If so, a five-year
| college friend should be able to sense whether something
| like that might 've been the case. I'm hoping maybe you
| did, and maybe you'd be willing to say so if so.)
|
| EDIT: I'm still a bit in shock, but it turns out that
| you're completely correct. Thank you, very much, for
| vouching here for Radon.
|
| He sounds cool.
| carapace wrote:
| > But the fair thing to do is to wait and hear from amjad.
|
| This.
|
| I feel it's likely your GP comment will turn out to be the
| most constructive one on this whole thread. It seems like a
| clear case of bullying, but if Amjad is like you describe
| then one must postulate some additional factor(s) to
| account for his behaviour.
|
| I'm reminded of a story I once heard about a sweet little
| old lady who suddenly became highly irascible and it turned
| out she had lead poisoning. These things happen. God
| forbid, it could be a brain tumor.
| CRConrad wrote:
| > I saw this pop up while I was out driving to the gas
| station, ...
|
| You're doing it wrong.
| menzoic wrote:
| Wow repl.it is no longer my goto. I will be finding another
| service that does the same thing.
| dimgl wrote:
| Yeah, not sure about this one chief. I don't know the legal
| aspects here, but I think it makes sense to not create an open-
| source project that competes with your previous employer and then
| correspond with them letting them know you did it...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Is this not what the CEO of repl.it did, moving from
| codeacademy to repl.it?
| dimgl wrote:
| I don't know about what the CEO of repl.it did. It shouldn't
| matter. I only know what the author has chosen to publish on
| his blog post.
|
| He corresponded with his previous employer regarding a free
| project that competes with them. When he got a negative
| response he then decided to air his dirty laundry on the
| Internet.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > It shouldn't matter.
|
| It matters in that it gives us a sense of what the norms
| are.
|
| repl.it's differentiator isn't just being a repl that can
| run different languages, it hardly competes directly with
| them.
|
| > When he got a negative response
|
| when he got threatened to be sued* he posted about it, I
| see no reason why doing so is somehow bad form while
| threatening to sue is not bad form.
| xenihn wrote:
| >I don't know about what the CEO of repl.it did. It
| shouldn't matter.
|
| Calling out hypocrisy absolutely matters. It matters a lot.
|
| In this case, it also provides a very important precedent.
| finger wrote:
| Wouldn't this only hold if you signed a competition clause, and
| if so then they would have to compensate you for not being able
| to work on technology X for Y amount of years?
| dimgl wrote:
| Yeah this is what I'm unsure of as it steps into the legal
| side of things.
|
| In general though, doesn't it make sense to not create a free
| competitor right after leaving your employer? They may have a
| case regarding stealing trade secrets given that they did
| give you access to their codebase and daily ops.
| abricot wrote:
| Create a competitor? Maybe you should give the article a
| read, mkay?
| jahewson wrote:
| There's no reasonable expectation of there being trade
| secrets in the repl.it source code. Trade secrets are
| narrowly defined and there's mountains of case law to shed
| light on the specifics. If they stole a super-secret
| algorithm not published anywhere else or stole a list of
| paying customers, now that would be a problem. But any
| handwavy non-specific speculation is so wild as to be FUD.
| _dwt wrote:
| I think that Repl.it can pound sand unless they've got an
| enforceable non-compete in their intern contract, and that the
| CEO seems a little unhinged, but it does seem unwise to e-mail
| them unprompted with this kind of project. Falls under the same
| general category as "don't talk to the cops".
| cole-k wrote:
| IANAL, but as someone who has used both tio.run and repl.it, I
| have difficulty seeing what sort of "competition" this
| constitutes (Riju, in my eyes, being very very similar to tio).
|
| Otherwise I would expect tio to have received some threatening
| emails as well (maybe they have?).
| dimgl wrote:
| I think the issue was that he was a previous employee.
| Normally I'd say "yeah, no problem, make a competitor" but
| he's been exposed to the internal workings of the company.
| anm89 wrote:
| He should probably stop working with computers altogether
| going forward as they are a company who uses computers
| after all.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of people
| are hired because of experience they have doing similar
| things at prior companies.
| ylyn wrote:
| This person's project competes with Repl.it in the same way
| someone doing Nand2Tetris competes with Intel (a bit
| exaggerated, but the point is there).
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| this is not reddit
| dimgl wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. How is this a Reddit comment?
|
| I don't think the author of this post is in the right here.
| Most people are piling on saying Repl.it is behaving
| irrationally. But to me it seems... in line with what an
| employer should think?
| zemo wrote:
| are you suggesting that publishing evidence against you is a
| bad idea on reddit but not a bad idea here? Or is your gripe
| that he said "chief"? That seems like focusing on the wrong
| thing entirely.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Once you leave? Don't really think they can do much as long as
| you aren't using trade secrets.
| 533474 wrote:
| Contact the FSF for advice, I'm sure they would like your project
| to join million others with legal backing!. Good luck!
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Kind of a shitty thing to do by that company. So much for
| embracing open source. And probably they don't have a real
| business case to begin with if they're threatened by a former
| intern's open source project. Likely scared they'll lose their
| funding once the investors see how weak they are.
| anderspitman wrote:
| This kind of feels like a bizarre inverse of the "I could build a
| better Facebook in a weekend if I wanted to."
|
| A company feeling threatened enough to risk a PR nightmare on a
| one man open source project, when they know better than anyone
| that their real value is in scale, account features, UX, etc.
| cocktailpeanuts wrote:
| It's kinda funny how this whole drama is for copying some
| "intellectual property" that anyone can easily build.
|
| If you don't want your virtual cloud sandbox app to be copied
| easily, build something that actually is novel. For example see
| Stackblitz https://stackblitz.com/ I think they're going to
| completely destroy all these Replit-like models.
| reitanuki wrote:
| Historically, you didn't need an account to use Repl.it. It used
| to be one of the best sites to go to for this kind of thing.
|
| After they added the account requirement and seeing this blog
| post, I think I'll have to change my opinion about them.
| fourseventy wrote:
| Agreed. I used to use Repli.it all the time if i just wanted to
| test some Ruby code real quick. Now when I go to the site its
| asking me to make an account and set up a project and all kinds
| of nonsense that I don't care about
| ogsalmanxx wrote:
| What a loser, never using replit again and advising my dev
| network to never touch it.
|
| Definitely will not consider it for my team.
|
| Don't be scared of them. They are scums.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Wow, what a fuck-up. I canceled my Repl.it subscription already,
| and I intend to migrate off the site entirely as soon as I can.
| mattbuilds wrote:
| I already have trust issues with stuff like Replit and similar
| products that try to move everything off my computer that I own
| and control and on to their server. I see the value in it but I
| would never trust it. Good to see their CEO show his true colors.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I feel that because the legal system is completely broken. Is
| there another way that we can deal with replit? This type of
| anti-competitive anti-open-source behavior should not be
| tolerated without consequence.
|
| https://replit.canny.io/general-feedback/p/how-replit-used-l...
| elihu wrote:
| It seems like Replit's complaint probably doesn't have much
| merit, but at the same time Radon's defense that "this is just a
| non-commercial hobby project" doesn't really matter either
| (except to the extent that Replit might be able to get a bigger
| judgement if they prevail in court if they can show economic
| harm). He's either infringing on Replit's intellectual property
| or he isn't. As far as I know there isn't a special legal
| loophole for "I did this just for fun".
|
| (I'm not a lawyer, so don't interpret this as anything other than
| a possibly poorly-informed opinion.)
| tester756 wrote:
| >In my opinion, the answer to this question is no, for a number
| of reasons:
|
| but did you use "internal" knowledge of repl it in order to build
| it?
| stopachka wrote:
| This sounds to me like naivete. Even if ideas were all publicly
| available on blog posts, there are existing competitors, and your
| project is open source, creating a copy of what you worked on as
| an intern is certainly in poor taste.
| dimgl wrote:
| I made a similar comment below. I'm surprised at the anger
| towards repl.it on this thread.
| devenvdev wrote:
| The anger is not directed at replit but at its CEO. The
| company's negative reaction is understandable, lawyering up
| in response to some freshly graduated intern that obviously
| had not intended any harm - not cool. They could talk much
| softer and the result would be the same. That CEO dude gives
| an asshole vibe - people react :shrug:
|
| edit: CTO -> CEO
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| > creating a copy of what you worked on as an intern
|
| According to him, he didn't:
|
| > "I worked for Replit in Summer 2019, where I was asked to
| rebuild Replit's package management stack and make it open-
| source."
| jlengrand wrote:
| Very tangential, but I've always looked weird at Replit because
| my first interaction with the product ever was through this tweet
| :
|
| "We're the most ambitious software startup in history." [1]
|
| My second interaction is this one ...
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1342891578394882051
| MattGaiser wrote:
| This guy seems to think he is entitled to nobody competing with
| him, to the point that he gets mad on Twitter about a random
| company doing the same thing as another company.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Everybody knows their own situation best, and makes decisions
| based on their values, beliefs, judgments, etc. And it's hard to
| question somebody else when you don't know all the inner details.
| But man, oh man, is it hard to read that and not kinda wish the
| guy had responded with something like:
|
| _" Fuck You. Sue me if you want, you won't get a damn penny
| because I don't have it. And how are your VC's going to react to
| you wasting their money on a frivolous lawsuit. Come to think of
| it, I'll be reaching out to all of them to ask that very
| question..."_
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Given he posted it on HN of all places, he effectively did just
| that, just in a longer form.
| nicebill8 wrote:
| I won't be using Replit any more; I'd like to use this instead
| though. I'm not supporting OSS suppression of any kind,
| especially for something so basic, fundamental and useful.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| lmao imagine being threatened by some dude's hobby project that
| he's not monetizing - how weak is your business and especially
| ego if that is the case.
| etherio wrote:
| Wow... This is really disappointing on Replit's part, especially
| considering the company's emphasis on an ideal of developer
| empowerment / creativity / collaboration, this seems very
| excessive.
|
| I hope there's more to this story than it seems, because Replit
| has been doing lots of good work and this would lower my faith in
| them...
| linuxfan2021 wrote:
| Repl.it should have no fear from this. A: There was no plans to
| make it commericial. B: It wasn't intended to be a CLONE.
| kazinator wrote:
| I don't think there is any fundamentally original idea in replit.
|
| It is a time-sharing system where you can log in and use a
| programming language.
|
| We have had those since not long after the dawn of computing.
|
| Since at least 1970, we also had smart terminals that allowed the
| user to fill in a form, and validate it, before sending it to the
| host.
|
| So the time-sharing session being carried out by a protocol
| between the web front end and back-end is not _ipso facto_
| original.
|
| Needless to say, neither is the idea of a repl running in a
| separate process that provides editing, with expressions sent out
| to a running image for evaluation.
| imiric wrote:
| Why does it have to be original to be a product people will pay
| for? There are plenty of unoriginal yet profitable products.
|
| What you've said is all true, but most users today don't use
| computers like that. Arguably developers already do if they
| have SSH access somewhere, but if repl.it brings that
| experience to a general audience via a web browser then it's
| already valuable.
|
| If the Chrome cloud VM idea[1] can raise millions in funding,
| so can a web timesharing system. ;)
|
| [1]: https://mightyapp.com/
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Why does it have to be original to be a product people
| will pay for?_
|
| No, no; for that it absolutely doesn't. People pay for all
| sorts of goods that are not original, like loaves of bread,
| pairs of sneakers or T-shirts.
|
| It had better be original if you're going to harass former
| interns that they're ripping off some intellectual property,
| and threaten them with lawyers.
|
| That's all.
| slow_donkey wrote:
| I agree with you but nothing about the comment was discussing
| whether or not people will pay for repl.it
|
| The context of this HN post is about originality itself.
| imiric wrote:
| True, but criticizing a lack of originality boils down to
| "this product isn't useful". I was arguing more for the
| utility/value of the service, which results in demand and
| customers.
| lez wrote:
| Lesson learned: Don't feed the troll (the CEO of repl.it) - just
| ignore.
| npv789 wrote:
| what a shame replit!!
| dodgepitchforks wrote:
| Publishing an open source project with functionality that is this
| close to the core functionality of a company you are working for
| seems to be Ill advised.
|
| It's usually not that difficult to keep work and passion projects
| clearly separate so that no one could be confused.
| fastball wrote:
| * previously worked for as an intern
| raverbashing wrote:
| I can't defend Replit here, but I think the situation could have
| been handled better from both sides.
|
| If you have just interned at a company, don't immediately go
| working on a similar thing and just saying "hey here it is". It
| will at best sound like sour grapes or looking like a "show off".
| At best.
|
| I understand, lack of experience and an eagerness to build leads
| to those situations. The answer from Replit was unnecessary.
| Giorgi wrote:
| OP can you send me your code please? For reasons...
| jwilber wrote:
| If the CEO didn't throw a tantrum over the exact things his
| company claims to support (OSS, creativity, etc.), nobody would
| know about the intern's weekend project. But he did, and now
| we'll see something of a Streisand effect [0].
|
| To be fair, it is kind of suspect to intern for a company and, at
| the end of that internship, turn around and create effectively
| the same thing. And OP's dismissive tone and propensity to hand
| wave away things that may be relevant in his blogpost certainly
| don't make them seem ideal to employ. But 'suspect' only in the
| sense that (in my personal opinion) it gives credence to the
| CEO's comment on the intern being difficult. I still think replit
| is in the wrong here.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
| colonwqbang wrote:
| Is it really? It's what he learned to do at the company, so now
| he's doing it.
|
| If the product was really unique, maybe. But from the
| description it seems to be a generic online repl.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Well, let's hope repl.it wasn't started by someone working on
| the same kind of tech at another well-known brand. It would be
| ironic or "kind of suspect", no?
|
| https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca...
| gabeio wrote:
| I had nearly the same feeling while reading this and
| specifically finally getting to the part where the author
| mentions they were an intern. Being an intern at the company is
| kinda important to this story, had they not been an intern at
| the company I think this would have been a vastly different
| conversation.
|
| I honestly think both are in the wrong here, the CEO should
| have been a bit more relaxed about the handling of this. As
| well the intern really should have tried to stay away from
| projects which directly relate to past company business models.
|
| I also question if this article could be considered defamatory.
| karagenit wrote:
| I think for something to be legal defamation, it has to be
| demonstrably false. This article seems pretty safe, since
| it's mostly direct screenshots of the emails sent by the CEO.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Non-competes are unethical and also illegal in California
| where replit is based.
|
| Edit: They aren't technically "illegal" in CA, just
| unenforceable.
| gabeio wrote:
| Based on what I am reading, unless I am misunderstanding,
| which considering how our laws are written I'm surprised
| anyone is capable of understanding them entirely.
|
| https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-
| in... (where I am reading up about this from)
|
| It seems California outlawed non-competes in the sense that
| if I am a programmer, and I sign a contract which states
| that I must not be a programmer for the next 5 years after
| working for X, _that_ is instantly voided.
|
| But this is different, as an intern I copied in essence the
| core business model (not directly copying the code) and
| open sourced it, seems like a conflict of interest. Which
| in this case a non-compete might be able to be held as it's
| mostly saying I'm a programmer for a company which does X,
| I can't move to a competitor, or become a competitor (which
| is somewhat what the intern did).
|
| As someone who is definitely not a lawyer or judge I have
| no idea where the laws/courts or otherwise stand on this
| matter in actuality.
| m-ee wrote:
| You are reading that wrong, the agreement you describe
| would not be enforceable in California
|
| The only part of a non compete that is valid to my
| knowledge is that if an employee leaves for a competitor
| the company can have them sign an agreement not to poach
| employees, but even that is very limited. If Bob leaves
| company A for company B and signs such an agreement, his
| former coworker Alice is free to say "Hi Bob I'm really
| excited by company B can I have a referral?" Bob didn't
| make first contact so he's free to help bring Alice over.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I think your understanding is incorrect. That site says
| specifically says without qualification:
|
| > In other words, non-compete agreements are not
| enforceable in California.
|
| Edit: I don't think it has ever been possible to bar
| employees from continuing their profession when they
| leave your employ. Non-competes have ALWAYS been about
| working for competitors.
| jjeaff wrote:
| In California, you would have the burden of proof that
| your business was damaged by the actions of the employee
| you allege is in breach of contract. The business would
| also be on the hook for the employees legal fees if they
| can't prevail.
|
| Add to that, i don't see any copying of a "business
| model" here. Seeing as the ex-intern is not even charging
| for his software and is giving away the source code for
| free.
| cycomanic wrote:
| He interned there two years ago, I would hardly call this at
| the end of the internship turn around.
| [deleted]
| faheel wrote:
| I'm going to build a repl.it clone too this weekend. Seems like a
| fun project!
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Online ides worry me because I worry ip ownership and lawsuit
| stuff. Knowing that my ide is run by a litigious company who
| loves to throw money at lawyers to attack innocent people is a
| hardcore dealbreaker
| cphoover wrote:
| One of the nice things about Repl.it was being able to
| spontaneously try out or demo code in front of a coworker or
| friend... Forcing signup/login introduces friction that makes the
| tool less useful
| [deleted]
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I think Replit knows that their entire business can be built by
| an intern with a few weeks of effort, and as a result is not
| valuable as a business in it's current state. They are obviously
| terrified that other people will realize this and there will be
| 500 clones out there by the time they figure out some defensible
| business model that locks in clients.
| codegeek wrote:
| Am I missing something ? You interned at a small company and then
| you built a very similar open source tool which is close to the
| core product they offer ? Whether the CEO is an asshole or not, I
| can't think of not agreeing with them here. Your "intentions"
| don't matter. If your work is very similar to your previous
| employer's , they have the right to ask you to take it down or
| come after you.
| google234123 wrote:
| Wait, so you think that once you work at Pepsi you are never
| allowed to create your own business selling soft drinks?
| codegeek wrote:
| I would assume not if you are using very similar formula or
| ingredients.
| spacefiish wrote:
| Yes, you are missing something. As stated numerous times in the
| article:
|
| > Replit's core value proposition isn't letting you run code
| online (you can do this in dozens of places for free), it's the
| features they offer on top of running code. 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.
|
| > Replit makes a webapp you can use to run code online in
| different programming languages. This is nothing new (just
| Google "run python online" for proof), so Replit's value
| proposition is extra features like sharing your work,
| installing third-party packages, and hosting webapps.
|
| The core value proposition of Riju (toy playground for hundres
| of esoteric languages) != the core value proposition of Replit
| (feature-rich online IDE environment with lots of integrations
| and additional support). The only thing they have in common is
| that you can run code online, and that's not an even close to
| an original idea by Replit in any way. The CEO making a claim
| that this project is "copying" Replit has no actual basis given
| that there are literally dozens of other "copies" out there
| that are closer to Replit than Riju ever is/was.
|
| I also have no idea how you can argue Riju is "very similar" to
| Replit, given how generic the technical common ground between
| them is. I also have no idea how you can argue it's a "tool"
| and not a toy, the author even explicitly said there was no
| practical purpose and served as an esoteric quarantine hobby
| project:
|
| > You might ask: Why did I spend so much time adding obscure
| programming languages to a webapp nobody was going to use?
| Well, let me put it this way: Is it the weirdest 2020 hobby
| you've seen? ... Riju is entirely non-commercial. Unlike
| Replit, I didn't seek funding from any source--advertising,
| donations, fundraising, subscriptions, whatever. I have no
| interest in running a business, and never really wanted Riju to
| become too popular, since I was the one paying the server bill.
| codegeek wrote:
| I am not a lawyer so I cannot discuss the details of whether
| it is exactly the same product or not but there are a lot of
| similarities (especially considering he interned at the
| place) which will make any CEO think. I mean IP protection is
| critical for software companies and whether the CEO is right
| or wrong here, I think it is unfair to shit on the CEO just
| because he is being rude/mean.
|
| If you intern at my company and then build a very similar
| product, I will be concerned.
| zemo wrote:
| so they said "we're gonna talk to some lawyers" and your response
| is to write a lengthy public blog post without any legal counsel,
| in which you publish private correspondence along with the other
| person's contact info without their consent, and in which you
| essentially document all of the evidence against you -and- admit
| you understood your actions? huh. That's probably not how I would
| have responded.
| teraflop wrote:
| Aside from _maybe_ the "admit you understood your actions"
| part, nothing in this blog post provides any additional ammo
| that the opposing lawyers' side wouldn't have had already.
|
| "Private correspondence" and "contact info" are not (in
| general) legally protected, and the contents of the email
| thread and the Github repo would be subject to discovery no
| matter what.
| [deleted]
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yeah I don't exactly agree with your characterization of this
| actions but I would be very surprised if he doesnt get legal
| action taken against him for this post.
| juancb wrote:
| I agree. This guy shows a consistent streak of poor decision
| making and lack of situational awareness. His behavior so far
| reinforces Amjad's claims that he was their most "demanding"
| intern.
| anm89 wrote:
| Yes, poor repl.it who's explicitly threatening to use their big
| bankroll to squash a small developer doing something he is
| passionate about it. He should just shut up and accept the
| validity of their effort to silence him.
| zemo wrote:
| it feels like you're intentionally missing the point here. If
| repl.it is acting as if they believe they have legal
| leverage, why respond by giving them more leverage?
| vidarh wrote:
| There's next to no additional leverage here, and bad PR is
| the best leverage you can get if you can't afford expensive
| lawyers.
| anm89 wrote:
| Ah now I understand. He should just go get his own highly
| paid lawyers and dig down for a lengthy legal battle. His
| own VC guys will foot the bill!
|
| Or he could get on the top spot of HN for free and get a
| massive amount of community support, potentially people who
| actually will foot his legal bill, for the price of a few
| hours of writing a blog post.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > He should just go get his own highly paid lawyers and
| dig down for a lengthy legal battle.
|
| Have you considered that what the person did in this
| situation was actually illegal?
|
| Yes, when you do illegal things, it is difficult to
| defend them in court. But that doesn't make him in the
| right.
|
| It doesn't even look like he was going to be sued, since
| he took down the website, and apologized.
|
| It was the kid who went public with all of this, in order
| to get the clicks and likes.
| anm89 wrote:
| What is your legal theory regarding what's illegal here?
| dang wrote:
| > _Lol, care to share your legal theory here Perry
| Mason?_
|
| Hey, please don't break the site guidelines by being an
| asshole on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is,
| or you feel they are, or how badly anyone else has
| behaved or you feel they have. It only makes things even
| worse.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: it looks like we've had to warn you about this more
| than once before. Would you mind reviewing the guidelines
| and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart?
| You can easily still make all your substantive points
| that way.
|
| Edit 2: thanks for the edit; that's indeed much better.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Hmmm... what laws do you think might have been broken
| here?
| stale2002 wrote:
| Any numerous things having to do with
| copyright/intellectual property, or something related to
| any of that general category of stuff.
|
| The person used to work at that company, and then they
| built a similar project, that looks really similar to
| that other product.
|
| So something to do with design copyright. You can't just
| copy someone else's designs, in a similar space, at a
| company that you used to work for. You probably run afoul
| of _something_ having to do with intellectual property or
| design copyright.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| What is your _exact_ definition of "design copyright"?
|
| And keep in mind, repl.it explicitly does not have any
| _patents_ (which would be the actual way for protecting
| an idea or design in the way you 're thinking) for
| anything they have done.
| stale2002 wrote:
| I am not referencing a specific law. I am talking about
| intelectual property laws in general.
|
| Surely people should be able to see how if you work at a
| company, and then release a product that copies what that
| other companies does, and you build something in such a
| way as it looks very similar to that other product, then
| there is a pretty big risk of running into intellectual
| property law or any number of legal issues.
|
| This is a broad category of laws, where you could run
| into numerous issues. That should be pretty clear.
| omega3 wrote:
| What leverage?
| zemo wrote:
| that's a much more reasonable question and would be a
| reasonable response, but OP decided that instead of
| asking that question, he's rather provoke repl.it. If
| they had no leverage before, asking what leverage isn't
| going to increase how much leverage they have. But this?
| This post seems to me like it's more likely to increase
| repl.it's leverage against OP than the reverse.
| anm89 wrote:
| To be fair, the one massive piece of leverage they have
| is their bankroll, regardless of the legal validity of
| their claim. However this just highlights the futility of
| turning this into a bankrolled lawyer battle.
| danso wrote:
| I definitely agree the CEO could've handled this better, in a way
| that wouldn't bring the Streisand effect down on him. But I also
| don't fault him for being suspicious when a former intern creates
| something that seemingly uses the same ideas and concepts that
| the intern directly worked on while at Replit. Even if the
| author's assertions (about not using any proprietary knowledge
| gained as an intern) are all 100% true -- the CEO is supposed to
| take those claims at face value?
|
| Also, the author's full email [0] doesn't do him many favors; for
| a discussion of a project that purportedly consists completely of
| open-source and public ideas, there are a ton of redactions.
| Like:
|
| > _" You're right that the existence of was initially brought to
| my attention by my work at Repl.it. But then again, it also shows
| up on lists of popular for JavaScript."_
|
| I'm not a lawyer, but I simply just would not have written that
| first sentence. Hopefully is something like "React.js", and the
| author is just being overly zealous in the light of Replit's
| legal threats.
|
| [0] https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2
| [deleted]
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Vote me down,
|
| but Ycombinator: "It's all about the founders blah blah blah" -
| if their process finds and funds these kind of people, the
| process is broken.
|
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/repl-it
| fsloth wrote:
| Is it broken? Based on historical evidence, signal that implies
| a strong startup founder does not necessarily imply a
| gentleman.
|
| Let's iterate some famous startup founders. I could totally see
| them going off like this. Steve Jobs? Check. Elon Musk? Check.
|
| Not defending bad behavior, but from point of view VC bad
| behavior is not necessarily a dealbreaker if they can deliver a
| unicorn.
| bravura wrote:
| Yes, but supporting remote by offering $0 - 0 salary and 0.00%
| - 0.00% equity seems legit and completely transparent:
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/repl-it/jobs/aihA75TQr...
| mypalmike wrote:
| Seeing that I would simply assume they didn't want to
| advertise specifics about salary, which is not unusual, so
| they entered 0 into a form. Am I missing something?
| caslon wrote:
| Illegal if seen by people in certain parts of the USA.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| This seems like an illegal job listing in Colorado.
| samatman wrote:
| A cursory glance[0] suggests this only applies if a company
| has at least one employee in Colorado.
|
| [0]: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/colorado-pay-
| transparen...
|
| To follow a tangent for a second, this doesn't seem wise on
| Colorado's part. It doesn't strike me as great law to begin
| with, but I'm willing to concede that point: the problem is
| that it creates a considerable regulatory burden for an
| all-remote company which takes on a single Colorado
| employee.
|
| As someone who works remotely since well before the
| pandemic, I'd be pretty upset about this if I were a
| Colorado resident. I have family in Colorado as well, and
| while I've never seriously considered moving there this law
| makes it even less likely.
| drusepth wrote:
| I've seen a lot of companies "get around" this new law by
| just saying the job is not available to people living in
| Colorado, either explicitly on the listing or when you
| apply.
| [deleted]
| jollybean wrote:
| I suggest that it's not actually $0 but rather they didn't
| want to disclose the ranges in the form.
| ngngngng wrote:
| Having just experienced my first "brain rape" from a recent YC
| grad I concur. The behavior of Amjad is similar to what I
| experienced interviewing (and apparently performing free
| consulting) with the company I was just speaking with.
|
| Maybe these situations are not the norm, but they are certainly
| happening.
| sudosteph wrote:
| Ugh. Now I feel a bit guilty for referring a friend and
| former co-worker of mine to a company that is also a recent
| YC grad... He got hired, so I'm hoping that's not the same
| company and that it's not the norm... but that sounds awful
| and demoralizing.
|
| Between this, and the story the other day related to founders
| bragging about taking advantage of certain vaccination site -
| it certainly seems that there is a basic "asshole filter"
| somewhere that YC does not have tuned correctly.
| Alternatively, they do have it tuned - and they don't mind
| assholes so long as they make them money... But yeah, YC
| should probably respond to some of this. Even if it's not a
| trend, it seems to now have the appearance of one.
| samatman wrote:
| Yeah, holding a VC fund and accelerator responsible for every
| tantrum thrown by one of their proteges is worth a downvote.
|
| This kind of catastrophizing doesn't contribute. For one thing,
| you jumped from "this kind of person" to "these kind of
| people", without supporting evidence.
|
| Do you have a process which can identify, in advance, everyone
| who is going to be an asshole to a former intern? While picking
| enough winners to make bank? Please share!
| CRConrad wrote:
| > For one thing, you jumped from "this kind of person" to
| "these kind of people", without supporting evidence.
|
| Not much of a jump: "kind" at the very least strongly implies
| the plural already. If you mean just one person, you _say_
| "this person", whereas "this kind of person" means "this
| person and others like him". AFAICS "this kind of person" and
| "these kind of people" are pretty much synonyms; the only
| difference between them is that the former is grammatically
| correct.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| Can someone with knowledge in law tell me?
|
| If (in another world) he made this project with commercial motive
| and used some of the design decisions, would this actually be
| illegal?
| teraflop wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but: Intellectual property rights fall into
| specific, legally-defined categories, such as copyrights,
| patents, trademarks, and trade secrets.
|
| I don't see any hints that patents or trademarks are involved
| in this dispute in any way. Copyright violation seems unlikely,
| unless the intern improperly kept a copy of source code that he
| had access to while he was employed.
|
| I could _maybe_ see an argument for misappropriation of trade
| secrets, but the company would have to be able to make an
| argument that whatever specific secret information he used gave
| them a real competitive advantage, _and_ that they took
| reasonable steps to protect it. (Having talked about their tech
| stack in engineering blog posts, as the OP alleges, would
| provide him with a pretty strong defense.)
|
| If there's no IP infringement, then it doesn't matter whether
| there's a commercial motive or not.
| Driko04 wrote:
| anyone who has ever interviewed with Amjad knows hes two-faced.
| He had a posting for a marketing position open forever and would
| have you work about 3 weeks for the interview. He would ask for
| marketing campaigns and how to implementing them. thinking that
| he was testing your skill set but actually just stealing ideas. I
| use to use Repl.it but forget. I really hope this company burns.
| He lacks the understanding of what the face of a company means
| and every time i see or think about this company, i just remember
| how i was treated by the guy who supposedly wants to "change" the
| world and "help" people. he makes me sick
| amjadtwofaced wrote:
| I second this. A lot of people who interfaced with him at
| Facebook has a lot to say about him being two faced and
| dishonest.
|
| Dude is the epitome of virtue signalling to any side that will
| give him money.
|
| YC has gone to shits that they couldn't identify it.
| jollybean wrote:
| So this is a serious claim, did this happen to you? Or is this
| a situation you have intimate knowledge of? Of is this hearsay?
| creata wrote:
| > i just remember how _i_ was treated
|
| Pretty sure it's a personal recount.
| maddyboo wrote:
| Is it ironic that Amjad's last tweet before this post hit the
| front page links to a hashtag on his website where people are
| building clones of famous games like Bejeweled, Mario, and Zelda?
|
| https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401760537390714882
|
| https://replit.com/apps/kaboom
| atarian wrote:
| I just want to say how much I appreciate the author's courage in
| coming forward and disclosing this publicly. Too often, people
| are afraid of retaliation when shining a light on rotten
| behavior. If this CEO ever follows through with his threat, I
| will be sure to donate to a legal fund in your defense.
| thayne wrote:
| The most frustrating thing about this to me is the implication
| that whether the OP was right or wrong is irrelevant because
| Repl.it has "lots of money" to spend on "top lawyers."
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Wild. A better CEO would have made you an acquhire offer to work
| at Replit. I would be shocked if you don't get blow back/more
| threats from the CEO for posting these emails.
| p0nce wrote:
| They were already offering him a job.
| samatman wrote:
| And they might have gotten him back on the team if they
| hadn't spectacularly blown it.
| ipaddr wrote:
| This post alone is costing replit thousands because many
| developers reading this will treat them as toxic.
| [deleted]
| aneutron wrote:
| If your business is threatened by a non-commercial one-man open
| source project, you have a lot more problems on your plate than
| that single "issue"
| thecupisblue wrote:
| Haven't used replit, our product is still in stealth and we're
| looking for funding, but tbh I'd love to have you work (part-time
| remote or whatever) for us. Im quite discombobulated on why they
| are doing this instead of offering you a job.
|
| I say good job Radon and if you ever want a job doing open things
| for fun where a company wont't sue you afterwards, ping.
|
| This behaviourk... it is not just unethical from their side, it's
| also showing their lack of belief in their company or vision. If
| I was an investor, this would be a bad signal boost for them. And
| if I was you, I'd open the project again, work on it even more
| and tell them - sue me. This case would never stand, it's like a
| McDonalds employee making a burger at home and McD suing them. I
| just wonder, who the fuck does Amjad think he is? You aren't even
| innovating, this amount of ego-driven bullshit is a tell-tale
| sign that they wont do anything note-worthy except remain a
| glorified wrapper-as-a-SaaS. Reading this, I'm pretty sure I'll
| never use their product again.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| > Im quite discombobulated on why they are doing this instead
| of offering you a job.
|
| In fairness, they are doing this _as well as_ offering him a
| job (see the second email screenshot in the article).
| [deleted]
| cupofcoffee wrote:
| I really don't understand why people jump to conclusions so fast
| without hearing both sides.
|
| I understand no one wants the small guy to be bullied by the
| company but it's ridiculously naive to assume that the entire
| truth is contained in that blog post.
| danuker wrote:
| They realized you had the potential of taking away some of their
| traffic.
|
| Traffic lets them sell data, charm investors, and _maybe_ improve
| their service to a limited extent by analyzing that data.
|
| What do they have to lose by bullying you, since they have
| lawyers on the payroll already?
|
| You could ask a lawyer if you have a chance to win in court.
|
| Perhaps the EFF would like to grind their teeth on Replit and
| create a precedent: https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > They realized you had the potential of taking away some of
| their traffic.
|
| Understandable... but bullying people via email will take away
| even more traffic from their site (because of bad reputation)
| if the conversation goes public (as it usually happens).
| anm89 wrote:
| Sad that this is my expectation these days. In the past I'd say
| I'd no longer use repl.it but if I ruled out interacting with
| every company that did unethical stuff I had have to lock myself
| in an empty room.
|
| But still I'll make an effort to stop using repl.it going
| forward. What a scumbag move.
| yewenjie wrote:
| Slightly off-topic - what is a secure way to run arbitrary code
| in arbitrary languages in a server? I know replit's polygott
| docker container allows it.
|
| https://github.com/replit/polygott/
| mgomez wrote:
| Have a look at Firecracker for running microVMs (originally
| developed at AWS before becoming open source):
|
| https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/
| detaro wrote:
| Ideally, many small VMs. E.g. that's what AWS Lambda does.
| ipodopt wrote:
| I would look at how the major clouds are running their compute
| instances. This might help:
|
| https://www.nomadproject.io/
|
| Which is basically k8s but lets you use vms.
|
| I was thinking of using Tekton to make a CI/CD service at one
| point but I would pretty much need to smash the whole k8s
| VM/Node every time I do something and only allow one
| participant at a time. There are ways to run vm pods instead of
| containers in k8s but there are other issues at play. It's been
| a sec.
| faraaz98 wrote:
| I think the CEO feels threatened by this project and how the
| simplicity of it would make replit feel not so special. And it
| particularly offended by "replit superiority" commit.
|
| Running docker containers and giving them a frontend shell is not
| complicated enough to have "trade secrets". Given OP's code can't
| scale at all.
|
| This is just an insecure CEO
| aritmo wrote:
| Looks like this "Replit" is a joke service. Too easy to replicate
| and no reason to use them.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Hopefully a Russian is reading this right now, and cloning Replit
| bit by bit. (Don't like bullies, especially new money guys.)
|
| Never thought I would have to say that as an American, but it
| seems like wealthy plaintiffs win too often, and it's not worth
| the risk?
|
| Hell--this jerk sounds like he might threaten you next with a
| Libel lawsuit. Think about deleting this post?
|
| If they do sue, and win you have a judgment against you. If you
| don't have any assets, they can't do much, but you don't seem
| judgment proof. Those judgements can attach your salary. They
| last 10 years, and can be renewed perpetually forever, at 10
| percent. Ten percent people. (They should not be 10 percent. I'm
| in CA.)
|
| It's too bad our civil court system can be so unethically gaguged
| by money.
|
| I'm thinking about doing my own Chapter 7, and it's been scaring
| me for years now. I'm so broke I could probally ride it out, but
| I want that judgment off me. It has really affected my life in a
| bad way.
| throwaway928301 wrote:
| I interviewed for a job at repl.it a while ago. At the very
| beginning of the interview process I wanted to make sure that he
| would be ok with my rate (120k) and that we're on the same page,
| because coding interviews can be time consuming. After the
| interview process, he offered a contract-to-hire and low-balled
| at less than half of what we discussed at the start of the
| interview process, and then retracted the offer entirely 2 weeks
| later after negotiating and what I thought was part of
| onboarding...
|
| I did well in all of the interviews, but I had a bad experience
| at the final interview where I had trouble setting up the
| React/Typescript/Parcel tooling for the coding project, taking up
| a very significant chunk of the allotted time. Usually parcel
| doesn't give me grief and a breeze to set up, but I guess I had
| bad luck that day. I noted that I should prep the tooling for the
| stack before any timed interviews in the future.
|
| I finished everything except that part, but I had started to set
| up the final step with the algorithm set up for it and discussed
| how to do it in the follow up discussion. It seemed like were
| impressed by my knowledge and still seemed interested in me, so I
| thought there was a shot.
|
| So here's the abbreviated email chain:
|
| Amjad: "[...] we can't move forward with a fulltime offer at this
| time. However, what do you think about doing a 2-week contract
| project that if it goes well we'd extend a fulltime offer?
|
| If this sounds good to you, we'd talk about the terms of the
| fulltime offer before moving forward with the contract project so
| that you have an idea of the potential compensation for a full-
| time position."
|
| Me: "Yeah I'd definitely be interested in the contract-to-
| potential full-time offer. [...]"
|
| ...then a whole 2 weeks go by discussing over email with him on
| salary negotiation, W2, benefits, etc. The 2 week contract offer
| would be at the rate we agreed on for salary, and if it went well
| then I'd go on to full-time. I thought it was a done deal and he
| was just prepping the contract, but then a whole week goes by
| without hearing from him, so I follow up with him.
|
| He replied:
|
| Amjad: "So sorry for the delay, but we decided to go with someone
| else for the role. Let's stay in touch for future opportunities."
|
| Me: "I don't understand, we agreed on an offer two weeks ago. Is
| there any feedback you can give me if it's something on my end?"
|
| Amjad: "We didn't agree on an offer [...] so I suggested doing a
| contract as a way of an extended interview. And then we went back
| and forth and the details, meanwhile we continued to interview
| and found someone who's local and a better fit for the role.
| Sorry, this didn't go differently."
|
| Me: "[...] The way I interpreted it is that you've finished
| interviewing for the role and wanted to extend this trial-to-hire
| period, or a hire with a probation period, and if it didn't work
| out you'd extend the offer to your second pick. You didn't
| mention anything about an extended interview. [...]"
|
| Amjad: "I thought explaining where you didn't do well in the
| interview and saying "therefore we can't extend an offer" would
| be clear."
|
| It felt pretty shitty at the time...
| selykg wrote:
| And with that I won't be renewing my Replit subscription.
| lbriner wrote:
| It's probably annoying and upsetting but it is no different from
| any other legal dispute. All you have to remind yourself is that
| legal stuff is business-as-usual for any sized company about a
| handful of people.
|
| Are they correct legally or morally? Maybe, maybe not. Are your
| arguments compelling? Yes but I am not a lawyer and even if I
| was, the result is the same. Being correct doesn't avoid the
| legal action. They have more money than you and maybe they want
| to spend it trying to get you closed down. Maybe they win, maybe
| they won't but sadly it comes down to the same thing? Do you want
| to risk whatever outcome they are threatening and can you afford
| to?
|
| You could always wait to see what exactly they are alleging
| before taking action but if the CEO is a dickhead then he might
| not care about the details, and might sign off a few 10Ks of the
| budget just because he can.
|
| Welcome to business!
| spoonjim wrote:
| I could understand an over eager lawyer but this is the CEO of a
| company with $20 million in funding personally threatening to sic
| the lawyers on a one man open source project. This is evidence
| that: 1) he doesn't have anything better to do, bad news for
| Replit, 2) he's afraid of this little project, also bad news for
| Replit.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| That was my first thought.
|
| How 'empty' is Replit as a company if some rando intern is a
| threat ... and/or how poor is the CEO at deciding how to spend
| his time if this is how they choose to do it?
| chapium wrote:
| The CEO's ego was rejected and now he's dumping on this guy.
| Seems like a classic NPD response.
| uncomputation wrote:
| I'm also gonna add that, if I invested in a company and the CEO
| used any fraction of that funding to crush a non-competitor
| with legal might, I would seriously regret my investment. It
| seems to me this guy doesn't understand his own value prop more
| than a former intern.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Is it possible that CEO will get kicked out for bringing so much
| negative attention to the company?
| [deleted]
| mathattack wrote:
| Companies definitely have to be careful about not coming too
| heavy handed. Many states also have protections for side
| projects.
|
| Even still, if you start a project that is very similar to your
| day job, you're asking for trouble. Imagine you are the CEO and
| someone says, "Our intern is open sourcing something very similar
| to our core product." That will always look bad and cause a
| reaction. How heavy handed the reaction is will vary, but every
| company will react.
| sequoia wrote:
| I agree the CEO is being very silly and stupid, but author is a
| bit ambiguous about whether he is or isn't making a replit clone.
| "they say they make it easy to share and remix your creations--
| but when _I tried to remix Replit itself_ " OK this makes it
| sound like the author _is_ writing a replit clone, or as he calls
| it "remix." Referencing repl.it by name in commit messages:
| probably good to avoid this.
| klohto wrote:
| Pretty serious accusation with petty comments from the CEO.
|
| Feel like we are missing some crucial part of the story though.
| Doesn't make sense why would they go out of their way to threaten
| a small open-source project.
| clevergadget wrote:
| I am so jealous of your lived experience
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| OP seems to be pretty talented here. They were able to build a
| clone in no time.
|
| If Replit CEO had any brains he should have thought about hiring
| OP as an exceptional engineer and work with them.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| Apparently he tried (and failed), which is perhaps further
| evidence of OPs talent.
| 123123as1asd12 wrote:
| I think both of you are wrong.
|
| One, you worked for them then took their idea (which they took
| form someone else) and made an open sourced better version of it.
| I don't care if you did not use any internal information, it
| looks like you did to everyone else.
|
| Two, Why the hell did you share it with him? to rub it in?
|
| Three, actually I'm on his side, even though he is acting
| childish.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I'm an advisor for a large coding Bootcamp, and I was about to
| recommend they use Replit across the board for all of their
| students. I will now be recommending that people stay as far away
| from this company as possible. This kind of behavior is unethical
| and intolerable, and worse, suggestive of deeper issues with
| Replit's governance, decision making, etc.
|
| In the very least their poor decision making will now cost them a
| massive deal, so now there is a positive spin :)
| tehalex wrote:
| Why would any developer ever use replit again?
| adsharma wrote:
| The next cool thing is not "run python and 30 other languages
| online". It'll be write python, translate to other languages and
| then run them online.
|
| We're at 7. https://github.com/adsharma/py2many/
| dustymcp wrote:
| This is an amazing ceo error, he probably lost way more goodwill
| on this reaching HN mainpage than he ever would have just leaving
| the project up.
| aparsons wrote:
| Amjad comes off as super insecure in this- and it's not all that
| surprising considering REPL.it really has little or no
| competitive moat
| clevergadget wrote:
| lets be real, his response is the kind of thing you hear from
| someone whose ship is sinking and starts lashing out in every
| direction
| procgen wrote:
| Atrocious. I've never used replit, and now I never will.
| aboringusername wrote:
| So this is when we purchase "fuckreplit.com", offer a _far_
| superior clone and watch as the free market does its magic?
|
| Every time I read a story like this I just hope the business
| dies, and for any employees it's time to jump ship, you really do
| not want to be working for a CEO who makes comments and threats.
|
| Time to release that source code, have 100 clones appear and let
| this loser sue everyone into misery - I'm sure his investors
| won't be best pleased.
|
| For now let's spread this story (make a backup! He'll want this
| taken down as it's terrible PR!).
|
| Hope replit rots.
| ORioN63 wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201004004511/https://github.co...
| wearywanderer wrote:
| May I suggest replsh.it ?
| boboche wrote:
| I think RIPlit would have better potential at attracting
| customers than anything using the f-word :)
| odyslam wrote:
| REKT.it is also nice
| oauea wrote:
| Wow, absolutely pathetic. My company was evaluating this for pair
| programming and testing new hires, but just binned that idea. If
| anyone from replit is reading this: This is costing you business.
| Jetbrains Code With Me looks quite nice.
| Grustaf wrote:
| It would be helpful if you could post the designs side by side so
| we could all judge if you have copied the design. If you haven't,
| they are simply in the wrong and you should re-publish you site.
| If your design is a copy, then most of your arguments are not
| very relevant.
|
| > Every similarity between my project and Replit can be explained
| by looking only at GitHub repositories and blog posts that were
| published online by Replit itself, making them obviously not any
| kind of secret.
|
| I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to copy
| their design even if it is public.
|
| Most of the bullets under "In my opinion, the answer to this
| question is no, for a number of reasons" also seem beside the
| point. It's not allowed, or ethical, to copy an existing service
| just because yours is free, or "not intended to compete".
| burnished wrote:
| Honestly I think they make their point quite well, but some of
| those bullets points came across as a young person adding any
| argument they could think of/needing some validation on these
| points with the net effect that it weakened the overall
| argument (by being easily nitpicked).
| autarch wrote:
| > I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to
| copy their design even if it is public.
|
| That's not true. This depends entirely on the license of the
| relevant (repl.it) GitHub projects that the author is
| referencing. I don't know of any open source license that
| allows you to copy & modify code but somehow forbids you from
| reusing intangible design elements.
|
| This case is a little confusing, since it sounds like a case of
| simply producing a similar result _without_ copying any code
| from the repl.it repo. But given that you can copy the code to
| get the same result (again, assuming a FOSS license), I don't
| see how the license could forbid someone from using the same
| design _without_ copying code. But IANAL.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| > again, assuming a FOSS license
|
| replit is not open source though. Only some parts of it are.
|
| You can infringe copyright without copy-pasting code. If I
| read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, burn my only
| copy of the book, then write and publish Jerry Schmotter and
| the Alchemist's Gem, a novel about a teenage boy with a star-
| shaped scar, etc., I'm probably infringing copyright even if
| I didn't word-for-word copy any part of a Harry Potter book.
|
| There's a reason why "clean room" design exists; to maximally
| protect yourself against claims of infringement, you want the
| implementers of your copycat product to not even have seen
| the original implementation:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
|
| Copy-pasted code is a smoking gun but it's not necessary.
|
| (I really have no idea if replit would have a case though.
| Seems dubious. But generally Copyright law is murkier than
| what some programmers think.)
| [deleted]
| autarch wrote:
| I understand all that. The author claimed that all of the
| relevant design elements were part of repl.it's open source
| projects on GitHub.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| That's not what I understood form the blog. I interpreted
| this:
|
| > Every similarity between my project and Replit can be
| explained by looking only at GitHub repositories and blog
| posts that were published online by Replit itself, making
| them obviously not any kind of secret.
|
| to mean some similarities are explained by a public blog
| post, not by a repo. A public blog post does not give you
| license to copy something.
| autarch wrote:
| Ah, that's a good point. It's unclear what exact design
| elements are being referred to, and whether they come
| from public source or a blog post.
| greenshackle2 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm afraid this is where the lawyer tells you the
| answer is fact specific and they're gonna need X hours at
| $Y/hr to answer, where X times Y is more than you're
| willing to spend to defend a hobby project from legal
| bullies.
| cole-k wrote:
| Riju is down, but I had a chance to use it for a few minutes
| when it was up. To me it was very similar to tio.run, so take a
| look and see for yourself how they are similar to repl.it.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| He has a second page with that shows the UIs (not quite side by
| side, but you can easily scroll up and down to compare them).
| His is extremely minimalistic. It looks pretty much exactly how
| I would picture a weekend project like this to look.
|
| The only real similarities are the use of a green colored run
| button near the top (Which replit stole from IDEs anyway), and
| the basic, black screen terminal on right, white background
| text editor on left layout.
|
| >I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to
| copy their design even if it is public.
|
| He is arguing against the allegation of violating their trade
| secrets. The similarities being based on public information
| makes them not valid as trade secrets. If you publish your
| trade secrets, they are not trade secrets anymore.
| acid__ wrote:
| Amjad has tweeted about this:
|
| > There is a difference between copying a feature and actually
| getting intro a contract, and access to the code, copying it and
| calling it open-source.
|
| > As a matter of principle, when someone goes into your home and
| steals from you, even if it's not material, you have to respond.
|
| https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| So an intern goes to make an identical project to the one he
| worked in and present it as purely independent project? It is a
| bit strange, and there've been issues with other projects being
| copied that way before, but jumping directly to legal threatening
| is too much.
| abductee_hg wrote:
| I am not sure that those threads are entirely legal.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Wow. I was about to apply for an open position at Replit. Not
| anymore.
| robertkrahn01 wrote:
| I've worked for ten years on the Lively Kernel project [1,2,3],
| originally created by Dan Ingalls at Sun Microsystems. Running
| JavaScript, Smalltalk, R, Clojure, Haskell, Python, C++ and a few
| other languages in it. When I first saw replit, I thought, wow
| someone copied 1/4 of Lively. Do they really think they had an
| original idea?
|
| [1] https://lively-kernel.org
|
| [2] https://lively-next.org
|
| [3] https://cloxp.github.io/cloxp-intro.html
| hcs wrote:
| Lively Kernel all runs in the client, though, while repl.it
| runs the code server-side. Not that this was new, either, but
| it seems confusing to compare to Lively. (It's been years since
| I've checked out either of these projects so sorry if I'm
| misremembering or missing new developments.)
| robertkrahn01 wrote:
| Not quite, Lively runs code both client side (JS, languages
| implemented on top of JS) as well as server side. The Lively
| server has a "subserver" system [1] that allows you to
| connect to VMs, compilers, etc.
|
| [1] https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel/tree/master/
| cor...
| seg_lol wrote:
| There still exists a fork of the Riju project on github which I
| have cloned locally.
|
| I would be more interested in running _all_ of these languages
| in wasm and the execution state can be live migrated between
| the server and the client, that would be something that could
| surpass other online repls.
|
| https://qvault.io/python/running-python-in-the-browser-with-...
|
| Repl.it has no standing to code written by Radon.
| diogenesjunior wrote:
| >There still exists a fork of the Riju project on github
|
| Link?
|
| Edit: NVM, found it: https://github.com/umesh-timalsina/riju
| robertkrahn01 wrote:
| Yeah wasm is definitely getting interesting as a platform for
| these. As long as you can build/compile a language VM (such
| as the Python VM) or a language compiler itself in wasm there
| shouldn't be much stopping you.
|
| Thinks like that have been done even with plain JS and the
| results are very cool, see e.g. SqueakJS, a Squeak/Smalltalk
| VM implemented directly in JS.
|
| [1] https://squeak.js.org/
| merb wrote:
| well there are tons of online repl's or online ide's that came
| way before replit. cloud9/eclipse che and than there is this
| list:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_source_co...
| and this: https://joel.franusic.com/online-reps-and-repls
| tzs wrote:
| Did any of the Replit people _work_ on Lively Kernel? I think
| what has the Replit guy upset is not that some random person
| did something similar, but rather that someone who worked at
| Replit did something similar.
|
| As far as Lively Kernel goes, is there a list of languages it
| supports? All I got from your links is that it is a JavaScript-
| based web development environment, seems to have a lot of
| Smalltalk related stuff, and that it includes something called
| lively.ide, which provides "Tool support for programming and
| debugging JavaScript, HTML, CSS, shell" and "Other languages
| can be plucked in as needed (see cloxp and LivelyR)."
| Dah00n wrote:
| No but the CEO worked at Code Academy so he actually kinda
| did what he is accusing the intern of doing.
| [deleted]
| robertkrahn01 wrote:
| > Did any of the Replit people work on Lively Kernel?
|
| No, and I wasn't suggesting that. Though Lively was a project
| at YC Research in 2016/2017 and replit is a YC 18 company I
| think. So they might have heard about it but I do not
| remember giving any demos to folks involved with it.
|
| And even if, we actually invited folks to copy the ideas. The
| Lively project was not a product but trying to carry forward
| a set of ideas rooted in Smalltalk. Every copy (even if its
| not a good one) is cool to see. It has the change to make the
| language and tooling eco system better, programming easier
| and more immediate, and might invite more people to get
| started building software and having fun with computers.
|
| > is there a list of languages it supports
|
| No not really. We build out a few to have more polish (as you
| mentioned LivelyR and cloxp, support for shell programming
| and node.js that is part of Lively itself). But there isn't
| really much to it: here is e.g. a quick'n dirty Haskell
| "subserver" that can run as part of Lively and allows to load
| a Haskell runtime, load Haskell files and evaluate
| expressions [1] (this is anno 2013, please don't judge too
| hard about the code ;). Some of these are floating around. We
| then customized the ACE editor [2] a bit for providing some
| fundamental editing experience (it has syntax highlighting
| for a large number of languages builtin). That's it, for a
| simple integration, not much is needed really.
|
| There is also the amazing Ohm project [3], a toolkit for
| writing PEG parser and interpreters which is standalone but
| got its integration into Lively as well. It allows to quickly
| experiment with new language ideas or implement
| grammars/interpreters for existing languages.
|
| [1] https://lively-web.org/core/servers/HaskellServer.js
|
| [2] https://ace.c9.io/
|
| [3] https://github.com/harc/ohm
| piemadd wrote:
| > Though Lively was a project at YC Research in 2016/2017
| and replit is a YC 18 company I think.
|
| You're right about Replit going to YC after Lively, but
| Replit actually started much earlier (2009ish)
| tome wrote:
| So did Lively, apparently
|
| > originally created by Dan Ingalls at Sun Microsystems
| scroot wrote:
| Hey Robert, it would be great to get in touch. I'm part of
| a group that has built an authorship system inspired by
| HyperCard/Smalltalk [1] and we are using OhmJS to implement
| our language and interpreter.
|
| We are inching closer towards a more "public" release, and
| hope to be there in the next few weeks
|
| [1] https://github.com/dkrasner/Simpletalk
| robertkrahn01 wrote:
| Your project looks very interesting :)
|
| Not sure if I can help but happy to get in touch. Feel
| free to shoot me an email or such, contact links in my
| profile.
| daneel_w wrote:
| Put the project back up. Replit's CEO has already shat all over
| his dinner table.
| coolgoose wrote:
| So, any chance for a link to the open source project so we can
| accidently spawn a lot of new clones? :)
| paulcarroty wrote:
| Just deleted Replit account, and heavily suggest the same action.
| codingdave wrote:
| > Naturally, I took down my project right away...
|
| So a CEO bullied you. He threatened to have lawyers look at
| something, accused you of behaving poorly, and accused you of
| being difficult. He is being manipulative. He is trying to guilt
| / scare you into stopping. And it worked.
|
| For all readers... do not be afraid of lawyers. Especially if
| nobody has even talked to them yet. Lawyers do not like to lose
| cases, so will not push a losing agenda. Yet they also must do
| what their client asks, so lawyers looking into a concern, or
| even sending nastygrams... those are meaningless actions. It only
| becomes meaningful if and when if their lawyers indicate they
| believe they really have a case, or if your own lawyer believes
| they have a case. Everything before that is posturing and
| bullying.
|
| If I were in the same situation as OP, I'd state that my intent
| was positive, ask to be informed of the results of discussions
| with attorneys, and wish them to have a nice day. Admit no wrong,
| make no apologies, ignore irrelevant statements (in particular
| personal attacks), and just let it slide until they take a real
| action of some kind.
|
| Once they do take an action, then it might be appropriate to do
| what they want. But seriously... stop letting people be bullies.
| [deleted]
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "If I were in the same situation as OP, I'd state that my
| intent was positive,"
|
| My attorney: Never respond ever.
| aerosmile wrote:
| Love this comment and support it 100%. I think what the OP
| tried to express and not everyone might have picked up on:
| there's usually a step between where this case is at right now
| and a lawsuit being officially filed - that step would be a
| cease and desist letter. In it, the company (aka, their lawyer)
| would state the basis for their claims and would make a clear
| case for why they think they are entitled to those claims. At
| that point, you'd have a better idea if you're being bullied or
| if they have a case. IANAL so take this all with a grain of
| salt, but it would be unusual for a claimant to optimize for
| taking you to court over optimizing for actually resolving the
| case. The latter can be achieved at a fraction of the time and
| cost with a cease and desist letter, so that's where that step
| comes from. The downside is that the letter could be officially
| registered and could become a public record, which you would
| have to proactively disclose in your interactions with current
| and future investors.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| Counterpoint: be afraid of lawyers. They may not be able to win
| s judgment against you, but they can easily bankrupt you.
| Remember the case where a man criticized Proctorio and was hit
| with a SLAPP lawsuit aimed to silence him. He ended up spending
| 100k on legal costs and the case is only beginning. He would
| have been bankrupt despite being 100% legally in the right.
|
| Fortunately for him, EFF decided to support him afterwards. But
| do not count on EFF paying for your legal defence.
|
| Links:
|
| https://twitter.com/Linkletter/status/1385004344903290883
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900217
|
| https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-sues-proctorio-behalf...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898651
| gk1 wrote:
| A drawn out legal case can bankrupt you not only financially
| but mentally, too.
|
| The quantity and the length of emails sent by the author, in
| addition to the writeup, suggest they spent considerable time
| worrying about the situation.
|
| And it's only been a few days. Imagine if this becomes a
| multi-year case.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| It goes both ways. Imagine Replit's attorney going after OP.
| If OP didn't take down the site, then suing them is going to
| be a huge expense & waste of time. Is Replit really gonna pay
| some corporate attorney $600-ish per hour to harass someone?
| You don't even need a lawyer to show up in court and say "I'm
| a broke ass new grad, and these guys are trying to take down
| my website. I don't even know why, but I'm dragging it out
| because I don't like being bullied." A good attorney would
| say "it costs nothing to demand we take this site down, but
| if the kid wants to fight us, do you really think it'll be
| worth the effort? I'm expensive and this is not a threat to
| your business." A bad attorney will just bleed Replit dry to
| accomplish very little.
|
| If you sue me, I'll just say "ok, see you in court, let me
| know if you need anything for discovery". You'll be spending
| lots of money and I'll be spending nothing. It's only
| expensive for me if I get an attorney, and I don't need one.
| What happens if we go to court and lose? I have to take down
| my website? If there's one lawyer in town, they drive a
| Chevrolet. If there's two lawyers in town, they both drive
| Cadillacs.
| msoad wrote:
| The attorney will never say this. They will bill hours
| after hours because it is in their best interest.
| tempestn wrote:
| The attorney is bound to act in their client's best
| interest. A bad lawyer might do that, but a good lawyer
| will indeed tell their client when something isn't worth
| the cost, despite their own financial interest.
| gricardo99 wrote:
| If a client insists there was trade secrete theft, a good
| attorney would do their very best to argue this case and
| seek legal remedies. Most attorneys, being non-technical,
| would have to rely on experts to outline exactly what/how
| a trade secrete theft occurred.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| The costs for replit isn't the same as the costs for an
| individual. For a corporation the cost is already
| budgeted in and pre-taxes so why do they care?
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Because it's a time suck. Even if you have deep pockets,
| you have limited time. And potentially bad PR.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| By the time the threat is out, the PR damage is already
| impeding (see: this thread). And spending a few thousand
| dollar is simply not going to hurt a large corporation as
| much as it hurts an individual. By the way, this is
| similar for time: A large corporation sends a mail to the
| legal department and the case is taken care of. You need
| to find a lawyer, find the money, collect the evidence
| ...
| munk-a wrote:
| To be honest though - replit is still going to pay
| significantly more in legal fees than the individual.
| That all said they almost certainly bear that cost while
| the individual may not be able to do so.
| Retric wrote:
| Some people enjoy harassing other people with lawyers.
| Saying it's not in their interest is meaningless when
| someone is willing to spend 100k on a neighborhood fence
| dispute.
| munk-a wrote:
| Law suits cost both parties a whole truckload of money -
| replit almost certainly has a larger war chest than you and
| can outlast you.
|
| It's easy to stand on the sidelines and criticize this
| person for not being a martyr to the cause of our terrible
| legal system - but, while such a lawsuit would never throw
| you out of your home, it could very quickly drain your
| personal savings which, if you have a family that's reliant
| on that savings for future education, could be devastating.
|
| It is 100% reasonable and a good idea to reach out to the
| EFF if you're being cyber-bullied by a corp with an axe to
| grind, but standing on your own in this sort of a scenario
| is certainly going to inflict a fair bit of pain on the
| aggressor - but it's likely going to inflict a whole lot
| more pain on you. Lawsuits like this can be tied up in
| appeals essentially until we die of heat death given our
| legal system unless you get extremely likely.
|
| Additionally I feel like you're making the assumption that
| the work a lawyer does is essentially busy work - discovery
| is an insanely expensive process to comply with and messing
| something up during discovery and accidentally deleting a
| key piece of evidence won't get you a "Well, you're just a
| rando - we'll let it slide" from the judge.
|
| Lastly - if the trial actually did end up going to court,
| it's extremely likely you're going to lose without the
| assistance of a legal professional, US law is insanely
| complicated and I can almost guarantee that your current
| employer is breaking some law on a technicality currently,
| I have no idea what it is - but without legal council
| neither will you.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It doesn't _have_ to cost a truckload. You can spend a
| truckload on lawyers if you want, but realistically, what
| is the maximum damages that a judge would award if replit
| won this case? $1k? Maybe? I wouldn 't be surprised if
| there were lawyers willing to defend this obvious case on
| a no win no fee basis.
| gricardo99 wrote:
| what is the maximum damages that a judge would award if
| replit won this case? $1k? Maybe?
|
| IMNAL, but with trade secrete theft I imagine the damages
| awarded could be whatever the other side is able to
| convince was the harm done. E.g. "... defendant open-
| sourced our trade secretes, which was forked by
| competitors, causing irreparable harm ... seeking $15MM
| in damages ... and legal fees, etc.."
| jacksnipe wrote:
| If you don't own your home, I fail to see how it could
| never throw you out of your home.
| munk-a wrote:
| Actually - I'm quite uncertain how bankruptcy laws
| interact with renting in the US so maybe that is a
| possibility.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| In a BK, some states may force you to liquidate a house
| if there's equity in the home. Other states will let you
| keep a primary home.
| munk-a wrote:
| Damnit America - why do you suck so much.
| gricardo99 wrote:
| I think you have way too much faith that a legal proceeding
| will reveal the "truth" about your intentions and actions.
| It's about competing narratives and interpretations of
| "facts".
|
| If it goes to a legal proceeding, it is about convincing a
| stranger and lay-person (i.e. Judge, or perhaps even worse
| a group of jurors), that you didn't violate the law. You
| have to do this while the other side is doing their very
| best to convince the same stranger that you are a devious
| thief who did irreparable harm to their company and cost
| them millions in damages (or some other absurdly large
| number). They will paint everything you did and say as part
| of your plan to steal from and damage their company. They
| will have highly qualified experts submit very convincing
| reports, and testify, that what you did was trade secrete
| theft, and caused immense damage. Your only defense will be
| to push your own narrative that can counter all of this,
| sufficiently to get you off the hook. You'll need at least
| a lawyer, perhaps experts of your own, and all the cost
| that this entails. This will be a big deal to your life,
| but will be a business expense (i.e. before taxes) for the
| company suing you.
| bluGill wrote:
| Of course you get a lawyer before it goes to court.
| However you can do the first round without a lawyer. Just
| a simple letter saying you dispute a claim is enough in
| some cases to tell the others you are serious. If you get
| a response after that, then find a lawyer.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Or simply ignore them until they actually sue you.
| gricardo99 wrote:
| I'd say ignore is better than DIY your response.
| munk-a wrote:
| Possibly? But I'd primarily say IANAL and you're best off
| spending the fifty bucks to get a half hour of some
| lawyer's time on the phone.
|
| A while ago I needed to briefly retain a lawyer to
| navigate a complex contract with my employer, there may
| be terrible lawyers out there but the person I reached
| out to was exceedingly thorough in explaining things (and
| I, as a dev, had lots of rules-lawyery questions to throw
| at them), quite prompt in their response and charged a
| modest fee.
|
| Speaking to a lawyer will absolutely cost you more than a
| coffee, but it's not _that_ pricey in the scheme of
| things compared to getting in legal hot water.
| gricardo99 wrote:
| totally agree. I was picking the least bad option
| between: a) ignore, b) DIY response. Of course, my
| opinion, and IMNAL :)
| munk-a wrote:
| You could probably get a response letter drawn up probono
| by the EFF for the initial claim - but honestly that
| response letter would likely cost you less than 100$ to
| have drawn up by a lawyer which is likely a more valuable
| way for you to spend your time to make sure everything is
| perfect.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| > What happens if we go to court and lose? I have to take
| down my website?
|
| No. What happens if you lose is you pay up to $150,000,
| plus costs and attorney fees, plus possible criminal
| penalties. (Here in the US, anyway.)
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#504
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I guess the main point I'm trying to say that one doesn't
| have to fold the second someone threatens you with legal
| action, even if you don't have an attorney. A porcupine
| don't automatically shed all their quills and throw
| themselves in a mountain lion's mouth as soon as the
| mountain lion eyeballs it with a hungry look. You can
| fuck with people who fuck with you. They may just go away
| when they realize you're not going to make it easy for
| them.
|
| The kid who posted this website could get a notarized
| affidavit saying he didn't steal any IP, here's how he
| got all the stuff, provide links to all the publicly
| available information, that he simply state that he built
| a hacky weekend project I good faith, and that no matter
| how much they pursued him or time they wasted on him, it
| wouldn't change the facts of the case. The more time the
| attorneys spend going after him, the more they just gonna
| waste their own time and look super dumb. Say they are
| free to pursue whatever legal action they want, just like
| you're free to stand up to a frivolous, insecure bully
| with too much money and free time. Take all the fun out
| of it for them, don't roll over and take it because
| you're afraid of being potentially bankrupted.
| weaksauce wrote:
| This is dangerous advice if the lawyer fees get paid by the
| loser of the suit like they do in some cases. ianal but i'd
| look into that before taking this tactic.
| bluGill wrote:
| In the US there is no loser pays clause - except that you
| can sue for legal fees as well. There are pros and cons
| of both, with no clear winner.
| User23 wrote:
| In the US it's way more complicated than that, and not
| just because there are 50 states that all have their own
| laws on whether or not the prevailing party can recover
| costs and it furthermore depends on the specific action.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| FALSE! FALSE FALSE FALSE! There are many, many
| circumstances in the US where the loser has to pay costs
| and attorneys fees. Like copyright infringement.
| https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#505
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| >> It goes both ways. Imagine Replit's attorney going after
| OP. If OP didn't take down the site, then suing them is
| going to be a huge expense & waste of time. Is Replit
| really gonna pay some corporate attorney $600-ish per hour
| to harass someone? You don't even need a lawyer to show up
| in court and say "I'm a broke ass new grad, and these guys
| are trying to take down my website. I don't even know why,
| but I'm dragging it out because I don't like being
| bullied."
|
| You are really underestimating how petty a lot of people
| are. I was sued for way less than this and the company
| suing me stood to gain nothing. Companies often have
| lawyers on retainer for this reason.
|
| You also underestimate the massive stress a lawsuit
| entails.
| munk-a wrote:
| John Oliver is actually a really good source for this
| sort of point as he dedicated an episode[1] to the trials
| and tribulations of his lawsuit against Murray Energy -
| something he described as a SLAPP suit which I think is a
| fair viewpoint.
|
| The replit case is especially interesting since it could
| be a lot more personal (because the dev behind it
| previously worked for them and people hold grudges) and
| also because it might actually be a lot more valid then a
| lot of other frivolous C&Ds we see (since they were a
| former employee and it would be impossible to claim they
| were unaware of how replit worked at a very basic level).
| I think this lawsuit is a lot riskier than most and
| replit certainly does have a leg to stand on in open
| court.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN8bJb8biZU
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >They may not be able to win a judgment against you, but they
| can easily bankrupt you.
|
| this depends on where the case is brought really. and if they
| can get any money from you there. Which is often partially
| effected by where you live.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > He would have been bankrupt despite being 100% legally in
| the right. Fortunately for him, EFF decided to support him
| afterwards. But do not count on EFF paying for your legal
| defence.
|
| Why? If you are 100% legally in the right then why wouldn't
| an entity with sufficient resources whose agenda is in line
| with that of yours support you? They will get all the
| expenses compensated after you+they win, won't they?
| lesuorac wrote:
| The loser only pays the winner's legal fees when required
| [1]. I'm not a lawyer but iiuc as long as you file in one
| of 21 states [2] you shouldn't expect to have to payout for
| making a pointless lawsuit.
|
| Anecdotally, there were a lot of lawsuits claiming fraud &
| etc in the recent US president elections and I haven't
| heard of a single case where they had to pay for losing
| them.
|
| [1]: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/attorney-fees-
| does-l... [2]: https://www.medialaw.org/topics-page/anti-
| slapp
| okdjnfweonfe wrote:
| because the legal system is human, a persuasive case is
| just as important as a legally backed case
|
| Also, can only field X amount of cases per period, unless
| they want to be dealing with burnout etc
| antonzabirko wrote:
| Sorry, are you going to pay my legal fees?
|
| If yes, please by all means reach out.
| codingdave wrote:
| What legal fees? It costs you nothing to ignore the posturing
| of bullies.
| antonzabirko wrote:
| That part yes, but what do you do once you get served? What
| do you do when you need to respond in court?
| klyrs wrote:
| What? Failure to heed a legal threat can result in a
| lawsuit. Failure to appear can result in a default
| judgement against you. Appearing in court without adequate
| representation isn't much safer. Appearing with adequate
| representation is probably out of OP's budget.
| sseagull wrote:
| You can ignore the stuff from the CEO, yes. But once you
| get a letter from a lawyer you should at least have a
| lawyer look it over and possibly draft a response.
|
| It can sometimes hard to tell frivolous vs. serious
| letters, and ignoring a serious one is not a good idea.
| Given any sort of emotional attachment to your business,
| and lack of legal experience, you might not be the best
| person to judge the situation.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| The point is that aggressive litigation is a common tactic
| large companies use to bully smaller players, because they
| know that the smaller players don't have the resources for
| extended legal battles.
| WJW wrote:
| Ignoring the posturing of lawyers on the other hand can be
| plenty expensive.
| frereubu wrote:
| While studying fine art I built a site that was intended to
| experiment with disrupting advertising by picking on a bullshit
| pseudo-scientific term, "bifidus digestivum", used by the
| company Danone as the live ingredient in their yoghurts, and
| ranking highly for that term on Google - it eventually got to
| the number 1 spot. Danone's legal team got in touch and we
| danced around each other for a bit. It was clear that the
| original domain used their trademark and that would be
| enforceable in court, so I gave that to them a couple of weeks
| after setting up a new domain that wasn't _just_ their
| trademark and redirecting all the traffic until Google caught
| up with the move: https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/ (They'd
| changed the magic ingredient's name by that point, partially
| because of the ridicule the initial name provoked). I replied
| to their emails addressing their points - no, I was not making
| any money from it so there's no commercial harm, I was just
| laying out the facts so there was no defamation etc. and after
| two or three bits of back-and-forth they went away. The site's
| had something like 500,000 visits since I built it in the late
| 2000s, which isn't a lot in the large scheme of things, but I
| hope it helped people who wondered whether it was bullshit
| _know_ that it was bullshit.
|
| I'm speaking from a UK perspective, so perhaps in the US it's
| different. While ignoring lawyers is stupid, waiting until they
| actually get in touch and looking at the merits of their case
| is not stupid, as the parent comment says. Then if they seem
| minded to pursue it anyway then fine, back down. But companies
| don't want to spend loads of money suing someone with no money
| either. The people who really lose are the people who entirely
| ignore the lawyers or are determined to take a case to court
| when they don't have the money for it out of some misplaced
| sense of righteousness.
| bww wrote:
| I appreciate the sentiment here, but this strikes me as very
| dangerous advice, especially framed as a blanket rule. Even
| more so when dealing with someone who has presumably far
| greater resources.
|
| There's no way you can know what this person's legal exposure
| might be without seeing their employment contract. They may
| well be completely in the right and this CEO is all bluster,
| but it's unequivocally bad advice to suggest that there's
| nothing to be concerned about based on the information you
| have.
|
| Even beyond that, I've (unfortunately) known companies that
| were entirely willing to dump money into lawsuits they knew
| they had no hope of winning just to set the precedent that you
| should not cross them or they'll bury you in legal expenses.
|
| In the end your advice may be exactly right, but it's
| definitely not reasonable to make these kinds of blanket
| assumptions.
| cduzz wrote:
| If you want justice, be prepared to pay for it.
|
| If you're unable to pay for it, you will not receive justice.
|
| I am aware that this is not the 1950's superman definition of
| justice. It is the "welcome to America" version of justice,
| that you often can't even get if you can pay for it, depending
| on who you are.
|
| So, you pick that fight. I've got a family and a life I need to
| protect; I'll stand on the sidelines and watch, thank you very
| much.
|
| https://gawker.com/how-things-work-1785604699
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I am aware that this is not the 1950's superman definition
| of justice.
|
| It's not any definition of justice, its simply the rule of
| the powerful over the weak.
| greatemulsifier wrote:
| Stop that. We aren't supposed to say the quiet part out
| loud.
| bostik wrote:
| So, at least in the US justice system it's one dollar, one
| vote.
| munk-a wrote:
| I don't think that's quite fair since the US justice
| system does allow for and has come to include advocacy
| organizations like the EFF and NAACP, and, even without
| those organizations usually individuals will end up
| paying significantly less for the same legal services
| (since most lawyers do have morals and will try and make
| their services affordable to less well off clients).
|
| But... other than those allowances... Yea, money is
| pretty important in the US justice system.
| Filligree wrote:
| For those living in America, that's what they can expect.
| It does no-one any good to pretend otherwise.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > For those living in America, that's what they can
| expect. It does no-one any good to pretend otherwise.
|
| Be that as it may, it likewise does no one any good to
| pretend it has any connection to justice.
| threatofrain wrote:
| > I am aware that this is not the 1950's superman
| definition of justice. It is the "welcome to America"
| version of justice, that you often can't even get if you
| can pay for it, depending on who you are.
|
| > Be that as it may, it likewise does no one any good to
| pretend it has any connection to justice.
|
| ...because someone on HN is going to be confused by the
| witty criticism of justice, and experience actual moral
| or intellectual confusion? Does this not strike you as
| linguistic pedantry?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Because we should never accept it. Never let it fade into
| the background of life.
| aphroz wrote:
| "You found paradise in America, you had a good trade, you
| made a good living, the police protected you, and there
| were courts of law."
| zelon88 wrote:
| I agree. One of the things the judge is going to ask both
| parties is if there were any attempts to resolve this issue in
| good faith outside of court. If you show up penniless with no
| lawyer, and they show up with a high end legal team to show off
| punitive damages and the only dealbreaker is that the little
| guy won't sit down and die quietly; you're in pretty good
| shape.
|
| The judge will tell you all to go away and try to find an
| agreement. This agreement will either be Replit leaving you
| alone or Replit buying you out.
|
| IANAL, but I was in a similar situation and I cannot see any
| circumstance where you get raked over the coals.
| gricardo99 wrote:
| As much as I also hate the idea of giving in to legal
| threats/bullying, I don't think this is very good advice.
|
| Lawyers may not like losing cases, but they like billable hours
| even more. So as long as their client is paying, they will
| follow their wishes as best they can.
|
| Even "meaningless actions" such as "cease and desist" letters
| or "demand" letters probably need consultation with a lawyer
| for a proper response. This "admit no wrong" advice can
| actually be tricky. What may seem like an innocent or innocuous
| comment could make your situation worse.
|
| By the time you have an actual civil action against you, you
| may have missed the opportunity to end the matter without
| getting to this point.
| newdude116 wrote:
| > Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing
| agenda.
|
| Most lawyers don't care since they are getting paid anyway. And
| something like a website that could be easily transferred into
| another jurisdiction or throw-away company? Good luck. This is
| not real estate where you are a sitting duck.
| ljm wrote:
| For all readers... this is a US-centric attitude and you must
| not seek legal advice on HN.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| It seemed obvious the OP had some loose threads or lack of
| confidence in his positioning. A _hard_ "no" only applies if
| you _know_ you 're right. If, on the other hand, you're hearing
| confusing, well-articulated words, from important people,
| caution nearly always is rewarded. Let them play their cards
| (if they will) and then afterward fully informed with whatever
| advice you choose to seek, decide whether to resurrect the
| project.
|
| The OP doesn't have an operating business, he can decide to put
| it on hiatus, as a resulting of bullying or for any other
| reason.
| mdoms wrote:
| > If I were in the same situation as OP
|
| Sure you would.
| tiltrus wrote:
| amasad is a regular HN'er who's very active in all posts
| related to repl.it.
|
| Very immature behavior on Amjad's part. I'm considering pulling
| our corporations subscription and moving to Stackblitz now....
| mindcrime wrote:
| _amasad is a regular HN 'er who's very active in all posts
| related to repl.it._
|
| Until, curiously enough, today...
|
| My guess is, his "top lawyers" and other advisors gave him
| instructions which amounted to - in layman's terms - "Dude,
| STFU."
| dsissitka wrote:
| He's just avoiding it. He retweeted this:
|
| https://twitter.com/pnegahdar/status/1402018604233732098
|
| And tweeted this:
|
| https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369
| munk-a wrote:
| Which is extremely wise advice honestly. This lawsuit is a
| bit muddled and less clear cut than folks have been
| portraying it. Speaking out in a forum like this may salve
| your pride but it isn't going to result in absolutely
| anything that's helpful legally - it can cause only harm.
|
| (And honestly - most HNers would just take the opportunity
| to bash him if he showed his face, so for his mental health
| as well I am happy he's keeping to the shadows)
| zo1 wrote:
| Agreed - this is very immature behavior and they will lose
| lots of goodwill and clients as a result of ego.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Was considering subscription, not anymore.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Unless you're wealthy, really wealthy, please DO BE afraid of
| lawyers.
|
| Specially in the US, where justice is mostly a rich man's game.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > if your own lawyer believes they have a case
|
| By this point, you have already lost (hundreds or thousands of
| dollars of lawyer fees and possibly countless sleepless
| nights).
|
| "Stop letting people be bullies" is unfortunately hard unless
| you are sure that you can afford the cost.
| munk-a wrote:
| Not quite - if your lawyer believes they have a case,
| especially a strong case, there is quite likely a good
| opportunity to settle out of court and the other side's
| lawyers (acting in their own client's best interest) will go
| out of their way to try and encourage them to accept a
| reasonable settlement.
|
| You're only boned if it actually goes to court - and even in
| that case you're still free to settle until the judge
| announces a verdict.
| [deleted]
| jfrunyon wrote:
| > It only becomes meaningful if and when ... your own lawyer
| believes they have a case
|
| That is true, but most people don't have their "own lawyer" to
| ask.
| mypalmike wrote:
| Is not too difficult to find a decent employment or IP lawyer
| to spend an hour with you for a few hundred dollars to go
| over a document and advise you on how to respond.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| A few hundred dollars? For a new grad that is a ton of
| money!
| mypalmike wrote:
| No doubt. My point was to provide an approximate bounds
| based on my experience in doing this for one-off legal
| matters.
| munk-a wrote:
| And that's sorta the rub - these costs are all really
| reasonable to anyone who's been working a white collar
| job for a few years, but it can be hard to afford for new
| employees and people in poverty.
|
| Thankfully there are organizations that will take up your
| legal fight for free in the US.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Many attorneys offer free consultations, so OP (or anyone in a
| similar situation) should've contacted an attorney and asked
| them what to do. The attorney would know very well if he was in
| actual danger or the CEO was just bluffing.
| temp8964 wrote:
| How can the attorney know for sure without going to the
| details? The guy worked for the company and created a very
| similar project.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| I would expect the free consultation to be "Hmm, that
| depends. Can you give me a copy of any contracts you signed
| with them? Oh and $$$. Send me $$$ too."
| AYBABTME wrote:
| Have you tried? I've got good 30min conversations with
| lawyers on the phone for 0$, and them telling me I didn't
| need their services after all, but to call them if X
| happens. Same with many other professionals, FWIW.
| erdo wrote:
| Yep that's been my experience too (UK lawyers). A few
| emails, a quick look at my contract (client was in breach
| by terminating without notice). The lawyers explained
| exactly what the legal situation was and told me that I
| would probably win an amount slightly less than their fee
| and they recommended I didn't bother - totally free
| advice.
|
| (Annoyingly the reason I wouldn't have won that much in
| damages was that I had mitigated my damages by finding
| another contract within days)
| munk-a wrote:
| I briefly used a lawyer in the states and the cost was
| extremely reasonable - in Canada I've used one much more
| and the cost continues to be quite reasonable.
|
| I think this impression is just a result of how lawyers are
| portrayed in the media, most folks are quite happy to sit
| down with someone and talk something through - moreso if it
| can be done entirely over email or the phone.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing
| agenda
|
| They will if they get paid.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Even if they get paid in advance, lawyers are acutely aware
| of the costs of litigation (even when you ultimately win) and
| that losing cases is one of the most common triggers for
| lawyers being sued, so, they really don't like losing cases
| even if they are getting paid. (There are caveats and
| exceptions, sure, but as a broad rule...)
| shkkmo wrote:
| Dropping a case or settling a case is not the same as
| losing a case. There is quite a lot of legal pressure and
| financial cost that can be applied that puts you at no risk
| of losing a case.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Successful legal or medical malpractice suits are rare, and
| there's insurance for that. All law firms are a little
| profligate and will have their own internal calculus as to
| how much to push the client.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| The problem is that it's impossible to know if the lawyer
| coming after you is one of the ethical ones or not.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| I'm not afraid of lawyers, but I've been sued (a real estate
| matter) and I am _definitely_ afraid of the U.S. civil law
| process.
| [deleted]
| ortusdux wrote:
| I was on the jury for a civil real estate case that was
| rather open and shut from the jury's point of view. Maximum
| damages awarded would have been in the 5 figures. It was on
| the docket for 4 years.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing
| agenda.
|
| They don't need to push it very far to cause a lot of harm to
| an individual and relatively bury them in costs.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| That's true, but there is no legal backing behind a laywer-
| initiated nastygram, so why fold before it even gets to that
| point?
|
| It's true, the US legal system can be hopelessly expensive,
| but it is still possible to push back before it gets to that
| point if you're sure you're in the right.
| drusepth wrote:
| especially a "new grad with no company, no funding, and no
| commercial ambitions"
| phkahler wrote:
| .. doing an open source project that does what a bunch of
| other sites are doing to some extent. It looks like he was
| about a week into it. Choose your battles. I'm guessing
| this really isn't a big ambition for this guy, but he
| probably wanted to flesh-out the concept for his own
| satisfaction having not gotten that far during his
| internship. That motivation is not new to me, but I think
| standing down and moving on to some other interest was
| probably a good idea. Now he's blogging about it instead.
|
| Dude, move on already.
| hbrav wrote:
| I actually really appreciate that he wrote this post:
|
| 1. What if I'm considering working for Replit? This
| behaviour would give me second thoughts. 2. Imagine I'm a
| VC firm deciding whether or not to invest in them. I
| don't want me money being used to pursue a frivolous
| lawsuit against a website that isn't a commercial threat
| and probably isn't using their IP anyway.
| zenlikethat wrote:
| Eh, personally I appreciate the blog. It's good to know
| who to avoid in the industry, and the accusation about
| trade secrets seems way overblown and egotistical. It's
| not that hard to figure out how to run a container when
| you push a button, or else said sites wouldn't be so
| common.
| jascii wrote:
| In the context of the article I took that as a gesture of
| goodwill while trying to talk out the misunderstanding. They
| had a relationship before this happened and it sounded like he
| wanted to maintain that relationship.
|
| In the end, this was a hobby project for the author, and I can
| understand he might not want to deal with the stress involved
| with possible legislation. The bully is the aggressor here and
| lets try not to blame the victim.
| stOneskull wrote:
| yep. we just won't ever use replit. their name is mud now.
| jascii wrote:
| I'm still hoping the CEO will come out of the woods with
| something like: "I'm sorry, I had a shitty day and acted
| like an ass." But that might be more grown-up than is
| realistic...
| jascii wrote:
| And indeed:
| https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _I 'm still hoping the CEO will come out of the woods
| with something like: "I'm sorry, I had a shitty day and
| acted like an ass."_
|
| We hope, but this is what we got:
|
| > _As a matter of principle, when someone goes into your
| home and steals from you, even if it 's not material, you
| have to respond._
| jascii wrote:
| Well, Repl.it sank from "oh, that's kinda cool" to "avoid at all
| cost in my book"...
| stuaxo wrote:
| Maybe I was just naive but when I first started reading HN there
| was a lot of optimism around startups, maybe it's just the scales
| falling from our eyes, but it just seems to be one shitty deed
| after another - maybe the ecosystem was always poisonous ?
| haram_masala wrote:
| I'd say startup culture has changed quite a bit over the past
| 25 years. It was always highly competitive, of course, but it
| has IMO lost some of the honor and unspoken rules that it had.
| Employees are much more likely to be screwed out of any
| windfall when a liquidity event or IPO occurs, for example, and
| in fact even junior investors get pushed around too.
|
| I honestly don't know what has caused this change.
| mattip wrote:
| There are thousands of startups. Are you generalising some bad
| actors to characterise an entire segment?
| pianoben wrote:
| I feel like there's been a dramatic shift in sentiment since I
| started reading HN in 2010/2011 or so.
|
| Having lived and worked through the last startup boom, it's
| easy to see why. Startups as a force in our economy and our
| culture were (once again) new and interesting and untested and
| exciting. You could make an app and be an "instant"
| millionaire! Money was flowing freely - the Bay Area office-
| warming parties from newly-minted Series A startups were a
| sight to behold.
|
| Of course we (I) saw it all with rose-colored glasses; reality
| is always more complicated. Years have passed, and the plucky
| upstarts have become capitalist overlords. Many vested
| interests have worked hard over time to establish an alternate
| narrative where tech is ominous, unaccountable, and used for
| political ill. People are people and do shitty things, even at
| startups.
|
| It's all just people and always has been, but for a time it
| really did feel special. Maybe I'm just old.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Wow, I'll go ahead and move them from the list of companies I was
| excited to see succeed to companies I will avoid forever.
| swang wrote:
| Assuming this is what happened.. why would you even worry about
| your intern doing a project. I don't know how long repl.it has
| existed (from my memory, a while) but are they that scared of
| something like this catching up to them and beating them in the
| marketplace? A product the author seemed to have no intention of
| releasing for commercial use anyways?
|
| Also isn't the entire point of an internship to learn from a
| company they're working for? Are they worried about their own
| current internal employees quitting and starting a competing
| repl.it clone?
|
| A bit shitty, IMO. Wonder if it's worth the hit in reputation.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| I interpreted the CEO's reactions less as scared and more as
| angry. The guy interned at their company, refused a bunch of
| offers, then released an open source project that at first
| glance mimics their own company.
|
| It seemed more like an emotional reflex by the CEO than a
| calculating ploy to suppress competition. Still doesn't bode
| well though.
| CRConrad wrote:
| Where did you get the _" refused a bunch of offers"_ bit
| from; did I miss that, or...?
| ezekg wrote:
| Not a good look that this may make the top 30 HN posts of all
| time by the end of the day. [0]
|
| [0]:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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