Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Link to your tweet, please?
Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
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Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#352Whoever is right here aside, this blog represents to me a common challenge IC/engineer/line worker types have understanding how the parts of the world, and related conflict resolution, actually works.
I think it causes a lot of frustration for them and is present in a lot of different industries. In the spirit of pragmatism, this is what I think it looks like if you'd like to avoid this pattern in your own career management:
- event happens driven by an IC-type
- a conflict happens over the event which exists on the narrative plane, where facts are fuzzy and emotions/identities get pulled in.
- the IC-type tries to get out of the conflict by listing a roster of facts, and sort of miss the boat on understanding that narrative conflicts don't really care about those facts.
- IC-types, totally justifiably b/c yeah facts matter when sourcing intent, are some version of befuddled or angry or whatever, usually try more facts, but nonetheless the conflict just stays around
- ultimately, they totally miss "the why" on why the conflict is actually happening, and as a result they are usually on the losing end of it
This blog is chock full of this approach. What it really reminds me of, and why I mention it, is a series of essays posted by a well known, long serving, but non-mgmt reporter who was fired from a famous paper recently. Same issue. Facts themselves and the nuance involved made things look at least understandable, the narrative launched for other reasons, and the reporter was fired. The reporter issued a series of essays staying in facts-land after getting fired, highlighting the facts-driven counter the reporter tried while in-house. Despite overwhelming facts, you could tell the reporter just wasn't aware of what had actually turned against them/what they actually had to address if they wanted to stay. He was speaking Language A and the team he had to work with was speaking Language Z.
Addressing a narrative isn't bending to it, but you need to counter it with something other than/in addition to the facts. These narratives can stay a long and have negative impacts much longer than you can "be right." Find the language of your criticism and make sure you counter in the same language.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#353"Fixed" title: "Replit asked former employee with thorough inside knowledge of their operations to take down copycat project which he sent directly to the CEO"
It's like y'all have never heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design. No, building a direct competitor to a business you have previously worked for is generally not ethical, and will almost always end up being infringing, because even if you're not trying to copy their code/design/whatever, you almost certainly will.
By the way, allowing users to run their own code, unsandboxed, on your dime, is generally a bad idea. What happens when someone uses it to distribute $illegal_material? Or send spam? Or starts logging what other people are running?
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#354I'm on a job search, and Replit is one of the places I was going to apply, off of their listings on HN Who is Hiring?. So much for that, and I suspect a lot of devs are going to feel the same. (I don't think I'm good enough to get in, but there're a lot of really good devs who read HN who are.) In a seller's market for developers, this could hurt them in the form of less good talent applying. That said, my gut feelin…
which is hilarious given that the CEO of repl.it is literally building something similar to a product that he worked on at codeacademy
The irony here is delicious.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, are you going to pay my legal fees? If yes, please by all means reach out.
What legal fees? It costs you nothing to ignore the posturing of bullies.
You can ignore the stuff from the CEO, yes. But once you get a letter from a lawyer you should at least have a lawyer look it over and possibly draft a response.
It can sometimes hard to tell frivolous vs. serious letters, and ignoring a serious one is not a good idea. Given any sort of emotional attachment to your business, and lack of legal experience, you might not be the best person to judge the situation.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hate to break it to you, but the vast majority of people are hired because of experience they have doing similar things at prior companies.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, are you going to pay my legal fees? If yes, please by all means reach out.
What legal fees? It costs you nothing to ignore the posturing of bullies.
The point is that aggressive litigation is a common tactic large companies use to bully smaller players, because they know that the smaller players don't have the resources for extended legal battles.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#358Wow never expected Repl.it to be so rotten in the core. I’ve followed their journey and happily recommend them on several occasions. Looks like after getting YC branding all gloves came off, and the success has gotten in their heads. Such a pity.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#359That'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 blogpo…
> 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.
What about option 3) here [1] - this email was initiated by Replit's CEO - so publishing the original email is...bad?
[1] https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/is-it-legal-to-...
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#360I've worked for ten years on the Lively Kernel project [1,2,3], originally created by Dan Ingalls at Sun Microsystems. Running JavaScript, Smalltalk, R, Clojure, Haskell, Python, C++ and a few other languages in it. When I first saw replit, I thought, wow someone copied 1/4 of Lively. Do they really think they had an original idea? [1] https://lively-kernel.org [2] https://lively-next.org [3] https://cloxp.github.io/…
There still exists a fork of the Riju project on github which I have cloned locally.
I would be more interested in running all of these languages in wasm and the execution state can be live migrated between the server and the client, that would be something that could surpass other online repls.
https://qvault.io/python/running-python-in-the-browser-with-...
Repl.it has no standing to code written by Radon.