Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project • Hacker News Board

Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

#261

Post by samatman » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

KingOfCoders wrote: post #95

Vote me down, but Ycombinator: "It's all about the founders blah blah blah" - if their process finds and funds these kind of people, the process is broken. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/repl-it

Yeah, holding a VC fund and accelerator responsible for every tantrum thrown by one of their proteges is worth a downvote.

This kind of catastrophizing doesn't contribute. For one thing, you jumped from "this kind of person" to "these kind of people", without supporting evidence.

Do you have a process which can identify, in advance, everyone who is going to be an asshole to a former intern? While picking enough winners to make bank? Please share!

Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

#262

Post by arp242 » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

archibaldJ wrote: post #157

whymauri wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

#263

Post by vickychijwani » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

johnwheeler wrote: post #113

Situation sounds like to me is: CEO keeps in touch with beast mode 10x'er intern who both impressed him and needed to be kept at arms length. Beast mode intern flirts with the idea of launching a competing startup under the guise of innocent open source project and transparency with a passing mention of project in email. CEO realizes he needs to shut intern down otherwise any communication that looks supportive might…

> Beast mode intern flirts with the idea of launching a competing startup under the guise of innocent open source project

From the article:

> I’m not a business person. I’m just an open-source dev who likes to build weird things for fun. (If you doubt my track record of building things that don’t make money, just check out the list on my website, and note the conspicuous absence of anything that’s ever made a cent of revenue.)

This doesn't make your interpretation impossible, but it's certainly very unlikely.

Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

#264

Post by jascii » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

Well, Repl.it sank from "oh, that's kinda cool" to "avoid at all cost in my book"...

Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

#265

Post by brianberns » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

pbecotte wrote: post #226

I...am on the side of the company here? wierd... An employee of a company left, and then made an open source clone of the company's software. The fact that the software was easy to clone or that others had done it previously doesn't seem really relevant. Several times I have left a company, and I could replicate a good percentage of it in a couple days too, not because it was easy, but because the months/years of exp…

Unless I’m misunderstanding something, the company’s software is already open source (https://github.com/replit), so cloning it is perfectly reasonable.

If there’s any dispute here, I think it would be over the copyright to the cloned code (if it really is a clone), but the article doesn’t mention anything about that, so I suspect it isn’t actually cloned at all.

Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

#266

Post by sam0x17 » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

pbecotte wrote: post #226

I...am on the side of the company here? wierd... An employee of a company left, and then made an open source clone of the company's software. The fact that the software was easy to clone or that others had done it previously doesn't seem really relevant. Several times I have left a company, and I could replicate a good percentage of it in a couple days too, not because it was easy, but because the months/years of exp…

But the point is, it's not an open source clone of anything proprietary. Their proprietary stuff is the collaborative capability they have added, accounts, sharing, etc. The stuff the intern replicated is a bunch of non-proprietary open source stuff (that they themselves open sourced), and he went well beyond what replit does by supporting hundreds of languages. They have zero chance legally of going anywhere with this other than scaring a small project out of existence. There is no case.

Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

#267

Post by dmurray » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #223

brabel wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

#268

Post by imiric » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

slow_donkey wrote: post #235

imiric wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with you but nothing about the comment was discussing whether or not people will pay for repl.it The context of this HN post is about originality itself.

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.

Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

#269

Post by londons_explore » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

If I were the CEO in this position, I would make sure the intern had shares/stock options as part of their comp, and my reply would be:

"Hi X,. It looks like a very cool project, but I'm slightly concerned that it's existence could hurt repl.it. And as shareholders, that could hurt both of us.

Let me know if you want a video call to discuss further.

X"

Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

#270

Post by gonehome » Mon, Jun 07, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

risyachka wrote: post #80

yellow_lead wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.