101–110 of 1001 posts
Publishing an open source project with functionality that is this close to the core functionality of a company you are working for seems to be Ill advised. It's usually not that difficult to keep work and passion projects clearly separate so that no one could be confused.
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.
Every time I read a story like this I just hope the business dies, and for any employees it's time to jump ship, you really do not want to be working for a CEO who makes comments and threats.
Time to release that source code, have 100 clones appear and let this loser sue everyone into misery - I'm sure his investors won't be best pleased.
For now let's spread this story (make a backup! He'll want this taken down as it's terrible PR!).
Hope replit rots.
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 were funded by YCombinator. Should we expect other YC companies to go after open source projects?
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.
This sounds to me like naivete. Even if ideas were all publicly available on blog posts, there are existing competitors, and your project is open source, creating a copy of what you worked on as an intern is certainly in poor taste.
> Every similarity between my project and Replit can be explained by looking only at GitHub repositories and blog posts that were published online by Replit itself, making them obviously not any kind of secret.
I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to copy their design even if it is public.
Most of the bullets under "In my opinion, the answer to this question is no, for a number of reasons" also seem beside the point. It's not allowed, or ethical, to copy an existing service just because yours is free, or "not intended to compete".
Did the author disclose the work on Riju as a prior invention before joining Repl.it? If so that puts him in the clear. I would also check your hiring contract to see what kind of clauses are in there about prior inventions. For larger companies, I don't think this company behavior would surprise anyone. I think I can understand where Repl.it is coming from. All I know is this behavior (by Riju author) isn't somethin…
IANAL but if he signed a non-compete maybe this could be a legal issue.
This sounds to me like naivete. Even if ideas were all publicly available on blog posts, there are existing competitors, and your project is open source, creating a copy of what you worked on as an intern is certainly in poor taste.
According to him, he didn't:
> "I worked for Replit in Summer 2019, where I was asked to rebuild Replit's package management stack and make it open-source."