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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
Or it speaks to Repl.it's CEO's lack of understanding of the technical differences. I wouldn't assume anything about the viability based on this reaction.
They should feel threatened. There's nothing particularly special or novel about what Repl.it is doing, also very little in the way of specialised knowledge required to build a competitor (note that I'm not trying to belittle the individual involved here). That they got $20 million to pursue this product in some ways surprises me given the relatively low barrier to entry.
> 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.
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.
>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.
I disagree, I don't see it that way. The very first email says "Don't worry, I have no intention [..]". That to me, indicates OP was aware they were in a grey area.
The CEO Amjad Masad has been doubling down on his story both here on HN and on Twitter. Also, this is a story told with receipts, and receipts carry a weight of their own. Namely, private emails made public. You can see for yourself whether you'll ever see the other side speak through the language of receipts.
It's also notable that Amjad used to work at CodeAcademy on up-and-going interactive coding experiences. Now he has his own company building up-and-going interactive coding experiences. What did Amjad learn while he was at CodeAcademy, being privy to internal business operations?
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.
Interesting. Now I think it really might be a (accidental) white box clone. A lot of stuff looks obvious in hindsight, especially if it is the best solution to the problem.
But then I believe this is legal (depending on your jurisdiction).
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.
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
I don't live anywhere near California (Québec), 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.
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.
As always seem to need a lawyer to be absolutely sure about any complex matter of law but it looks to me like creating even an identical product which this is not would fall within the scope of "any lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind" for clarity I read that as you can't stop a person from doing any of the above from a b and c rather than you can't stop someone from doing all of a b c.
I don't think Repl.it has a leg to stand on they just have a pile of money and the presumption of being willing and able to hire a shark in a suit to ruin someone's life with a baseless suit filed for the sake of harassment.
It's not clear to me that implementing the same concept after having seen and written some of their code constitutes copyright infringement.
If you hire an intern to work on your code base you own merely own the work that person creates for the duration of their internship. Your piddling money doesn't buy you the general knowledge of how such a solution works any more than an auto shop acquires by dint of buying a few hours of labor owns the mechanics understanding of how a transmission works.
Have you ever reimplemented something from scratch, perhaps in a different language, and ended up doing something in the same way as the original code? ... I sure have.
I would think that a few chunks of very similar code, and a well-paid expert testifying, plus the fact that he had knowledge of Replit's code from his employment, would go a long way towards a tough time in court for both parties. (Or, at the very least, that they both need to talk to lawyers before/when they start throwing around legal threats...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've encountered the irrational over invested founders first hand at a previous company. I worked there for about 6 months but it didn't really suit me so I moved on.
The founders seemed to get upset, I still don't really know why, presumably because of the short tenure. They then proceeded to not pay me my last month's wages while attempting to feed me various excuses or just failing to reply to messages.
I eventually got the case in front of a judge (self represented) and discovered that despite them telling me about their lawyers they were also representing the case themselves without any idea about the legal situation. The judge basically laughed them out of court, starting off by pointing out that even if all of their statements were correct they still had no legal basis for not paying the wages. The judge then checked their accusations (that I had lied to them during the hiring process) and found they were not correct.
Despite them having no legal basis the whole process was pretty stressful since until the court case I had been assuming they had some reason to not just settle. (I was mostly worried the recruiter had done something genuinely dodgy during the hiring process.)
I'm still surprised that those people can run a company for more than 5 years.
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.
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.
I'm skeptical that "the situation is muddier than it appears in the blog post." It seems clear to me that the CEO is acting irrationally, and given that, nothing about the story seems out-of-place. So I'm going to be pretty harsh towards the CEO in not extending them the benefit of the doubt, because I don't see any perspective where they're behaving appropriately.
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.
My understanding based on the blog post was that it was cautionary due to the threat of legal action. It seems clear that there isn't any doubt - it's caution due to the stakes.
When faced with an irrational actor making legal threats the rational choice might well be to back down even if you're 100% in the right but your loss from backing down is minor, so it tells us nothing.
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.
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.
Well, the author did post the entire email thread (redacting information that may be proprietary) on Imgur.
Personally, I think the Replit CEO could have explained what the specific issues were before threatening to sue. Since there was no explanation on the CEO's part, I think it's perfectly warranted for the author to make this public.
Interesting to see my post fluctuating between -4~4 points in the first few hours before settling down with the downvotes :)
Thanks guys for the comments. Definitely helps to view this matter from more angles, and it's clearer now. This is certainly a case study of who not to work for. (I didn't know so much about Replit and its CEO prior and totally missed the totalitarian vibe he is giving)
Curious to see how much the Replit community & ecosystem would be affected this event.
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.
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.
The other day, someone mentioned avoiding Chinese products and I argued it is not an easy thing to do. But sites like these? Easy decision. After this circus/drama, this site goes into my don't even visit the URL list. What a shitty behavior.
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.
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.
I don't really remember the context. This was 2+ years ago. He was trying to compare some search results on twitter vs google, when using exact match with one query but not the other.
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
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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."
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
That depends on where you draw the line of "innovation". Is it an innovation when it's created, or when it changes the status quo?
I would consider an approachable wrapper over a difficult tool to be innovative. Programming languages are essentially just UX wrappers over assembly. Is garbage collection an innovation, or a UX improvement? What about type systems? None of them make things possible that weren't possible before, they just make it easier.
Information for the sake of information is interesting, but where is it's value if it can't be applied to anything?
Right, I get the same impression from Replit. I don't know why I got subscribed to some weird accelerator newsletter they started and the wording is akin to the nigerian prince scam (and as a side note a REPL website creating an accelerator for sure gives me some dotcom bubble vibes).
I'm sure there are a lot of incredibly clever startup founders out there but I get the impression that more than not you attract founders that are more interested in the status rather than the innovation aspect. I said status not money as a lot of the time these folks don't really care about money as long as they can add a "Founder of X, an YC funded company" on their profile and share their next viral tweet, with lots of adjectives, lots of buzzwords and no depth. Startup funding became a game of convincing others that you as a person deserve the funding, not the company itself.
Pfizer doesn't really belong in that list. They applied money to an already made invention and scaled up an existing manufacturing process along with a dozen other companies. Pfizer is not even the only manufacturer of the BioNTech vaccine, nor is it the first manufacturer to express interest, nor did it take any risk.
I'd say the most innovative company in the world is probably Alphabet or Samsung.
I can totally understand why Alphabet is on the list, but what is your reason for regarding Samsung as the most innovative company? Nowadays I've found them struggling to compete with their Chinese and Taiwanese opponents.
Purely in the phone division, they are not that innovative. But they have their fingers in a lot of pies, and are still #2 in semiconductors, they innovate a lot in display technology, they have their own processors, Samsung Pay was pretty huge and still has a serious impact, they are one of the big lithium ion battery companies, the S-Pen also was really huge for mobile devices in general, their foldable screens have a lot of potential.
Another really big thing is that Samsung funds a lot of basic research also at the university level, which AFAIK none of the big tech companies do.
We had a startup called Runnable in 2013 that did a similar thing as repl.it. Coding sandboxes in many languages by spinning up docker containers on the backend [1]. We solved a lot of scaling problems, but I honestly thought the innovation was mostly handled by docker. And that was by 2013.
Well the product is obvious and easy to replicate without specialised knowledge. CEO likely realises this as much as everyone else so feels the need to overcompensate with personal marketing (and apparently now lawyers).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't seem to stop a lot of products when they target B2B or enterprise for whom the value proposition is actually the marketing, support, layers of regulatory compliance etc that they add. LastPass is an example. Whether Replit is doing that I don't know, but its a real model. Not, however one that is vulnerable to weekend projects.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
NDAs are legally enforceable in all of the US.
Non-competes are non-enforceable in California. NDAs however cannot be so generic that they act like NDAs and must be time limited and a few other caveats that aren't a big deal.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
In theory no that's exactly the sort of thing you'd need to make it go away, the mechanism exactly depending on the case.
e.g. if they had a patent on something and were accusing infringement you'd countersue to say the patent's invalid (which I think in a nicely engineering appealing way is conceptually separate from the question of whether or not an awarded patent has been infringed upon).
Trademarks, being a de facto recognisably you mark, are not if they are in widespread use - which is why you get a lot of big guys suing tiny little guys and tabloids pick it up outraged they'd pick a fight so below their weight - but at some point enough little guys diluting your brand is going to mean it's no longer your brand, your trademark, and then it's too late to fight it.
(IANAL.) I assume this isn't about a non-compete clause otherwise he would've just said that instead of this vaguer message. (And it was two years ago OP worked there anyway.) So unless there's a patent supposedly infringed on, or closed source code copied out, I don't know what the complaint could even be in the first place? Just reads like an empty threat to me. That 'repl.it superiority' commit message is unfortunate though.
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.
If they were that valuable why would you ever let them leave?
You can't end the employment agreement and still expect others to act like they work for you. Every ex-employee is a business person on the same level as you. If they see an opportunity and beat you, you were a fool for letting them go.
> working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they're doing
Radon outlined why this isn't true. [1]
> 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.
It appears as if you're advocating that Radon should've treated the open-source code as if it was closed? [1]
> This is incredibly unprofessional
In what world is it unprofessional to work on a personal side project that has ZERO commercial interests and is using 100% public open-source code? This is actually one of the most professional online disagreements I've ever seen..
> Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years
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.
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.
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.
Facebook is such a shitshow these days, I'm starting to wonder if the door is open for a straight competitor that is simply less aggrrssive on the advertising.
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.
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
"You don't need to remind you the essence of competition is
always been quite simple, any kid working in a garage
anywhere in the world with a good idea can put us out
of business".
Harassing independent developers working is an important component of the Antitrust plot. And that's what the replit guy is doing.
Milo: It would be open source, we offer it free to
everybody, just charge for tech support.
Gary: Wow, free.
It's a cut-throat business we're in Milo.
It's just a matter of time before someone borrows your
technology, improves it and makes a billion dollars on it.
What would you do with a billion dollars Milo?
...
The question really is,
How many of the people you share discoveries with
will be altruistic? and how many will make fortunes
of your generosity?
The movie shows the conflict between open source and proprietary software. Between altruism and financial opportunity.
Exactly my thoughts. CEO knows anyone could replicate the project.
I even go so far to say that the CEO doesn't want his secret to out that he is not that great programmer after all. He just took someone else's idea and build a company around it.
My reaction as well. I’ve used Replit lots. It’s great! No offence to Radon, but I would not consider his project a threat to Replit. The best case scenario is it’s a price-sensitive OSS alternative which would naturally have a much much smaller market. Interesting that the CEO was so threatened by this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oracle lives by selling to management. Replit isn’t at a stage where it can do that - it will love and die by developer goodwill until it becomes big enough for management to want to buy it.
Are they, though? I’ve never come across Oracle Linux used for any other purpose than running Oracle software on it. MySQL and Java were very popular before Oracle bought them, and people’s distaste for Oracle has pushed many users towards alternatives like PostgreSQL or MariaDB. Google famously wrote their own Java implementation to avoid having to deal with Oracle.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not to disagree with you. Didn't Apple sue Microsoft for copying the Mac UI on copyright ground? I know they settled, not sure what's the real legal outcome of it.
Edit: Ok, just looked it up. Apple lost all claims on copyrighting the Mac UI.
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.
Honestly there is nothing technically or legally wrong but I would say this was bad faith by the intern in a minor way. Like, its just not nice nor smart to do things that act against the interests of those that have put faith and trust in you. In this case, he's created a web site that at a surface level makes Replit look trivial to implement - boasts that in a weekend or two he's supported massively more languages. And absolutely, part of his knowledge as to how to do it came from what he probably learned there. So intentionally or not, he's done something that hurts the interests of his former employer.
So if you hired an electrician to fix a light bulb and then after they left they told everyone your house sucked. Illegal? no. Unprofessional? yes, slightly. Would you hire them again? no. Would you sue them? that would be ridiculous.
On balance, the CEO is clearly the one more in the wrong here and definitely acting in a dumb way. I would run away from investing in this company with him at the helm. But I would say there is a little bit of bad faith on the other side here too.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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".
"...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.)
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
The comment you are answering to refers to option 3 in the link that they post. It refers to the first answer to the question in that link, the relevant text is:
> 3. Offensive to a Reasonable Person: Publication of the private facts in question must be offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities.
The question is about whether it is illegal to publish a private email.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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?
You have to also factor in the difference in size:
What if you invite them into your home and then 2 years later you see they have decorated their dogs house with obvious inspiration from your own home decor.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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".
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.
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
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...
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.
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. ;)
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.
> 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.
Sorry, my reply was a bit too aggressive and I jumped to conclusions about what you meant.
You're right, though I still think repl.it has some right to be protective of their IP here. The originality of the service is in the ease of use and modernizing the old timesharing idea, so while they were quick to mention legal action and acted obnoxiously to their former intern, they're right to be weary of something that looks so similar to their product and judging from the emails even in the implementation details.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And I'm asking you to specify exactly which laws you think this runs afoul of. You can't just handwave "copyright laws" away.
Especially since there are no patents which protect the exact thing you're talking about. There is no such thing as "design copyright" other than actual, specific designs (fashion designs, specific graphics copy) that are copied. Ideas and software architectural designs are covered by patents. Something replit explicitly does not do.
There are a whole lot of laws related to intellectual property, employment, and contracts. It is a very wide field.
When talking about this kind of stuff, most people have not memorized the exact line number, in the exact paragraph, of laws that cover all sorts of things.
We are talking about hundreds or thousands of pages of law here. There is a lot to cover.
But the point is that there are a lot of laws, related to all of that.
And it is should be pretty clear how there is a risk to run afoul of something having to do with intellectual property, contracts, or the like, if you do something similar to what this kid did.
> There are a lot of laws, related to all of that.
Which are you referring to? Explicitly. As in, cite the USCC or similar statutes.
You have failed to do this when explicitly asked twice now. If you don't know, then don't pretend there's some IP boogeyman and then handwave it away when people ask for sources.
You're the one claiming they're running afoul of "IP laws" so I'm sure you should also be able to say exactly which laws he's running afoul of, right?
It is in fact not clear which IP laws you're referring to, especially when the ones meant to protect this very thing are not being used by replit.
There are thousands and thousands of pages and case law covering all sorts of these types of laws.
I am referencing this stuff in general. When talking about IP or employment law, or any of this stuff, in general, basically nobody is going to be able to quote an exact line number, because of just how many pages in all sorts of laws, that this stuff covers.
Once again, I am talking about all of this stuff in general. Surely you should be able to see how there is some risk involved in this kind of stuff.
My statement was that there was a risk of them running afoul of a bunch of these laws.
Not sure why you are trying so hard to straw man me on these statements.
Quite clearly there is a significant risk in running afoul of something, if you work at a company, leave, and build a project that does the same thing, and also looks very similar to it.
That was my original statement. And it seems pretty clear that there would be some risk in this.
Not sure why you have to be an asshole about a pretty obvious statement here.
But since you aren't actually addressing this statement directly, and have to go off on some tangent, that I never brought up, I can only assume you agree with my original statement.
The statment is only obvious to you. When you were asked why you think it is obvious, you just sort of wave your hands without any specifics and say "it's obvious" without providing any basis for what laws this person is "obviously" at risk of running afoul of. This doesn't add anything to the discussion.
You don't have to quote specific lines regulations, but you do need to do something to back your assertions besides just repeating "it's obvious" over and over.
Do you really not see how there would be at least some risk, in cloning a former employer's company, with a similar product, that looks the same as it?
You don't see at all, how that could potentially, could at least have some risk, of running afoul of IP laws, or copyright, or any number of things?
Do you admit that there is any risk at all of this?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
Yep. At $20m raised, the CEO should be building product, closing customers, building positive press for the company (oops), and recruiting. Time spent on anything else is highly suspect.
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.
From what I can tell, the CEO has a sore spot for copycats to the point of irrationality. Why I don’t know but he really really hates them in a deep way.
Maybe I was just naïve 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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadI 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.
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?
We only have one side of the story so it's hard to tell what exactly is going on here.
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.
Hopefully by publicizing what happened, he might get an offer for legal defense if necessary, then reinstate the project.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
Well this can be developed into a great replit competitor
Or at least it would save up a lot of boostrapping cost. Otherwise this whole thing indeed makes no sense.
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".
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.
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."
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.
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.
That doesn't give them a free pass to lash out at people.
Now, the only reason to make the conversation public is to apply public pressure to make something happen.
It's also notable that Amjad used to work at CodeAcademy on up-and-going interactive coding experiences. Now he has his own company building up-and-going interactive coding experiences. What did Amjad learn while he was at CodeAcademy, being privy to internal business operations?
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.
But then I believe this is legal (depending on your jurisdiction).
From reading the emails, it looks like the Replit CEO "trusted" that the OP was cowed into submission.
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.
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.
Still didn't stop everyone I've ever worked for from making me sign them, enforceable or not. I guess it's different elsewhere.
(That also says nothing about whether such a contract has or has not been signed by the relevant parties.)
I don't think Repl.it has a leg to stand on they just have a pile of money and the presumption of being willing and able to hire a shark in a suit to ruin someone's life with a baseless suit filed for the sake of harassment.
If you hire an intern to work on your code base you own merely own the work that person creates for the duration of their internship. Your piddling money doesn't buy you the general knowledge of how such a solution works any more than an auto shop acquires by dint of buying a few hours of labor owns the mechanics understanding of how a transmission works.
I would think that a few chunks of very similar code, and a well-paid expert testifying, plus the fact that he had knowledge of Replit's code from his employment, would go a long way towards a tough time in court for both parties. (Or, at the very least, that they both need to talk to lawyers before/when they start throwing around legal threats...)
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.
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.
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.
Besides that, 100% agree on the personal investment/grandeur trap for founders.
Kudos on fixing what was probably a fairly terrifying problem.
- Churchill (probably)
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.
We actually had one of those things, at the company I worked for. It was a monster, and had this tiny little screen, and a couple of 8" drives.
The founders seemed to get upset, I still don't really know why, presumably because of the short tenure. They then proceeded to not pay me my last month's wages while attempting to feed me various excuses or just failing to reply to messages.
I eventually got the case in front of a judge (self represented) and discovered that despite them telling me about their lawyers they were also representing the case themselves without any idea about the legal situation. The judge basically laughed them out of court, starting off by pointing out that even if all of their statements were correct they still had no legal basis for not paying the wages. The judge then checked their accusations (that I had lied to them during the hiring process) and found they were not correct.
Despite them having no legal basis the whole process was pretty stressful since until the court case I had been assuming they had some reason to not just settle. (I was mostly worried the recruiter had done something genuinely dodgy during the hiring process.)
I'm still surprised that those people can run a company for more than 5 years.
The problem with applying the "rational actor" test here, or anywhere really, is that to a first approximation people are not rational actors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally, I think the Replit CEO could have explained what the specific issues were before threatening to sue. Since there was no explanation on the CEO's part, I think it's perfectly warranted for the author to make this public.
Thanks guys for the comments. Definitely helps to view this matter from more angles, and it's clearer now. This is certainly a case study of who not to work for. (I didn't know so much about Replit and its CEO prior and totally missed the totalitarian vibe he is giving)
Curious to see how much the Replit community & ecosystem would be affected this event.
This is now on the first page of HN Search https://hn.algolia.com/
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.
I think his brother was also the QAnon shaman horn guy (at least he said as much on Twitter - maybe it was a joke?).
I get what you're saying here, but they made an entire TV series lampooning silicon valley culture.
Even in that show nobody was on meth iirc.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Building a better UX isn't done 'simply' - and the result is often worth billions.
I would consider an approachable wrapper over a difficult tool to be innovative. Programming languages are essentially just UX wrappers over assembly. Is garbage collection an innovation, or a UX improvement? What about type systems? None of them make things possible that weren't possible before, they just make it easier.
Information for the sake of information is interesting, but where is it's value if it can't be applied to anything?
I'm sure there are a lot of incredibly clever startup founders out there but I get the impression that more than not you attract founders that are more interested in the status rather than the innovation aspect. I said status not money as a lot of the time these folks don't really care about money as long as they can add a "Founder of X, an YC funded company" on their profile and share their next viral tweet, with lots of adjectives, lots of buzzwords and no depth. Startup funding became a game of convincing others that you as a person deserve the funding, not the company itself.
Yeah, not SpaceX or Neuralink or Pfizer. A company that runs docker images is the most innovative company.
I'd say the most innovative company in the world is probably Alphabet or Samsung.
Another really big thing is that Samsung funds a lot of basic research also at the university level, which AFAIK none of the big tech companies do.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20140702013410/http://runnable.co...
https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-kickst...
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.
If someone is invested and stands to loose money, it does not gice them a free pass to act immorally.
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.
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.
Not sure what they'll do if another company decides to reinvent it.. but /shrug
(to be clear, not defending them at all)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
e.g. if they had a patent on something and were accusing infringement you'd countersue to say the patent's invalid (which I think in a nicely engineering appealing way is conceptually separate from the question of whether or not an awarded patent has been infringed upon).
Trademarks, being a de facto recognisably you mark, are not if they are in widespread use - which is why you get a lot of big guys suing tiny little guys and tabloids pick it up outraged they'd pick a fight so below their weight - but at some point enough little guys diluting your brand is going to mean it's no longer your brand, your trademark, and then it's too late to fight it.
(IANAL.) I assume this isn't about a non-compete clause otherwise he would've just said that instead of this vaguer message. (And it was two years ago OP worked there anyway.) So unless there's a patent supposedly infringed on, or closed source code copied out, I don't know what the complaint could even be in the first place? Just reads like an empty threat to me. That 'repl.it superiority' commit message is unfortunate though.
Vague general ideas like "a car" or "140 character limit" are not property, and so cannot be stolen.
Acting this way is superbly entitled.
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.
You can't end the employment agreement and still expect others to act like they work for you. Every ex-employee is a business person on the same level as you. If they see an opportunity and beat you, you were a fool for letting them go.
Radon outlined why this isn't true. [1]
> 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.
It appears as if you're advocating that Radon should've treated the open-source code as if it was closed? [1]
> This is incredibly unprofessional
In what world is it unprofessional to work on a personal side project that has ZERO commercial interests and is using 100% public open-source code? This is actually one of the most professional online disagreements I've ever seen..
> Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years
hUHH ???
[1] https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/evidence
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
As OP says any value add is about accounts and sharing and whatever, the code-running in a browser functionality is two a penny.
I even go so far to say that the CEO doesn't want his secret to out that he is not that great programmer after all. He just took someone else's idea and build a company around it.
Just don’t do that, it’s in poor taste.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
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/
https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/develop-cloud/overview
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.
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.
Instead they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty.
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.
The unfortunate truth is that this doesn't matter. Oracle, as one recent example, is still wildly successful - even in the open source space.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Edit: Ok, just looked it up. Apple lost all claims on copyrighting the Mac UI.
So if you hired an electrician to fix a light bulb and then after they left they told everyone your house sucked. Illegal? no. Unprofessional? yes, slightly. Would you hire them again? no. Would you sue them? that would be ridiculous.
On balance, the CEO is clearly the one more in the wrong here and definitely acting in a dumb way. I would run away from investing in this company with him at the helm. But I would say there is a little bit of bad faith on the other side here too.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.)
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.
Again, it would be different if the CEO threatened a random third party that happened to do a weekend project in the same vertical...
https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in...
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.
This article and the associated 'press' could serve as a text-book case for insecure start-up CXOs.
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.
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?
Absent any NDA or other contract, there is nothing requiring the other party’s consent to publish correspondence in the US.
Finally someone raising the valid point about "it all depends on the legal paperwork signed."
> 3. Offensive to a Reasonable Person: Publication of the private facts in question must be offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities.
The question is about whether it is illegal to publish a private email.
> 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.
[0] https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/#is-replit-rig...
"it" could refers to the feature, not the code. That sentence is clearly ambiguous, the meaning slightly change based on what it refers to.
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.)
But your interpretation seems way too generous when he compares it to going into your house and stealing from you.
That sounds like a a disingenuous way of admitting that he knows he’s lying.
What if you invite them into your home and then 2 years later you see they have decorated their dogs house with obvious inspiration from your own home decor.
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?
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.
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.
Calling out hypocrisy absolutely matters. It matters a lot.
In this case, it also provides a very important precedent.
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.
Otherwise I would expect tio to have received some threatening emails as well (maybe they have?).
After they added the account requirement and seeing this blog post, I think I'll have to change my opinion about them.
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...
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.
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/
The context of this HN post is about originality itself.
in general yes, but in this case the criticism is warranted when Replit is claiming that that the open-source toy project somehow stole their idea
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.
You're right, though I still think repl.it has some right to be protective of their IP here. The originality of the service is in the ease of use and modernizing the old timesharing idea, so while they were quick to mention legal action and acted obnoxiously to their former intern, they're right to be weary of something that looks so similar to their product and judging from the emails even in the implementation details.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Especially since there are no patents which protect the exact thing you're talking about. There is no such thing as "design copyright" other than actual, specific designs (fashion designs, specific graphics copy) that are copied. Ideas and software architectural designs are covered by patents. Something replit explicitly does not do.
There are a whole lot of laws related to intellectual property, employment, and contracts. It is a very wide field.
When talking about this kind of stuff, most people have not memorized the exact line number, in the exact paragraph, of laws that cover all sorts of things.
We are talking about hundreds or thousands of pages of law here. There is a lot to cover.
But the point is that there are a lot of laws, related to all of that.
And it is should be pretty clear how there is a risk to run afoul of something having to do with intellectual property, contracts, or the like, if you do something similar to what this kid did.
Which are you referring to? Explicitly. As in, cite the USCC or similar statutes.
You have failed to do this when explicitly asked twice now. If you don't know, then don't pretend there's some IP boogeyman and then handwave it away when people ask for sources.
You're the one claiming they're running afoul of "IP laws" so I'm sure you should also be able to say exactly which laws he's running afoul of, right?
It is in fact not clear which IP laws you're referring to, especially when the ones meant to protect this very thing are not being used by replit.
There are thousands and thousands of pages and case law covering all sorts of these types of laws.
I am referencing this stuff in general. When talking about IP or employment law, or any of this stuff, in general, basically nobody is going to be able to quote an exact line number, because of just how many pages in all sorts of laws, that this stuff covers.
Once again, I am talking about all of this stuff in general. Surely you should be able to see how there is some risk involved in this kind of stuff.
Not sure why you are trying so hard to straw man me on these statements.
Quite clearly there is a significant risk in running afoul of something, if you work at a company, leave, and build a project that does the same thing, and also looks very similar to it.
That was my original statement. And it seems pretty clear that there would be some risk in this.
Not sure why you have to be an asshole about a pretty obvious statement here.
But since you aren't actually addressing this statement directly, and have to go off on some tangent, that I never brought up, I can only assume you agree with my original statement.
You don't have to quote specific lines regulations, but you do need to do something to back your assertions besides just repeating "it's obvious" over and over.
Do you really not see how there would be at least some risk, in cloning a former employer's company, with a similar product, that looks the same as it?
You don't see at all, how that could potentially, could at least have some risk, of running afoul of IP laws, or copyright, or any number of things?
Do you admit that there is any risk at all of this?
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.
"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.
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
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).
But still I'll make an effort to stop using repl.it going forward. What a scumbag move.
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?
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.
I honestly don’t know what has caused this change.
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.
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.
It seemed more like an emotional reflex by the CEO than a calculating ploy to suppress competition. Still doesn't bode well though.