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Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

intuitiveexplanations.com

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

#431

Post by lp0_on_fire »

darrenoc wrote: post #292
tomp wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#432

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

codingdave wrote: post #111

> Naturally, I took down my project right away... So a CEO bullied you. He threatened to have lawyers look at something, accused you of behaving poorly, and accused you of being difficult. He is being manipulative. He is trying to guilt / scare you into stopping. And it worked. For all readers... do not be afraid of lawyers. Especially if nobody has even talked to them yet. Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will…

> if your own lawyer believes they have a case

By this point, you have already lost (hundreds or thousands of dollars of lawyer fees and possibly countless sleepless nights).

"Stop letting people be bullies" is unfortunately hard unless you are sure that you can afford the cost.

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

#433

Post by faraaz98 »

I think the CEO feels threatened by this project and how the simplicity of it would make replit feel not so special. And it particularly offended by "replit superiority" commit.

Running docker containers and giving them a frontend shell is not complicated enough to have "trade secrets". Given OP's code can't scale at all.

This is just an insecure CEO

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

#434

Post by stonogo »

orliesaurus wrote: post #359
FiloSottile wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-...

What is option 3? Nobody numbered anything. If you're talking about copyright, this is obviously fair use.

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

#435

Post by bsjxh »

brabel wrote: post #203
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.

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…

> 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.

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

#436

Post by phkahler »

drusepth wrote: post #377
MattGaiser wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing agenda. They don't need to push it very far to cause a lot of harm to an individual and relatively bury them in costs.

especially a "new grad with no company, no funding, and no commercial ambitions"

.. doing an open source project that does what a bunch of other sites are doing to some extent. It looks like he was about a week into it. Choose your battles. I'm guessing this really isn't a big ambition for this guy, but he probably wanted to flesh-out the concept for his own satisfaction having not gotten that far during his internship. That motivation is not new to me, but I think standing down and moving on to some other interest was probably a good idea. Now he's blogging about it instead.

Dude, move on already.

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

#437

Post by robertkrahn01 »

tzs wrote: post #389
robertkrahn01 wrote: post #110

I've worked for ten years on the Lively Kernel project [1,2,3], originally created by Dan Ingalls at Sun Microsystems. Running JavaScript, Smalltalk, R, Clojure, Haskell, Python, C++ and a few other languages in it. When I first saw replit, I thought, wow someone copied 1/4 of Lively. Do they really think they had an original idea? [1] https://lively-kernel.org [2] https://lively-next.org [3] https://cloxp.github.io/…

Did any of the Replit people work on Lively Kernel? I think what has the Replit guy upset is not that some random person did something similar, but rather that someone who worked at Replit did something similar. As far as Lively Kernel goes, is there a list of languages it supports? All I got from your links is that it is a JavaScript-based web development environment, seems to have a lot of Smalltalk related stuff,…

> Did any of the Replit people work on Lively Kernel?

No, and I wasn't suggesting that. Though Lively was a project at YC Research in 2016/2017 and replit is a YC 18 company I think. So they might have heard about it but I do not remember giving any demos to folks involved with it.

And even if, we actually invited folks to copy the ideas. The Lively project was not a product but trying to carry forward a set of ideas rooted in Smalltalk. Every copy (even if its not a good one) is cool to see. It has the change to make the language and tooling eco system better, programming easier and more immediate, and might invite more people to get started building software and having fun with computers.

> is there a list of languages it supports

No not really. We build out a few to have more polish (as you mentioned LivelyR and cloxp, support for shell programming and node.js that is part of Lively itself). But there isn't really much to it: here is e.g. a quick'n dirty Haskell "subserver" that can run as part of Lively and allows to load a Haskell runtime, load Haskell files and evaluate expressions [1] (this is anno 2013, please don't judge too hard about the code ;). Some of these are floating around. We then customized the ACE editor [2] a bit for providing some fundamental editing experience (it has syntax highlighting for a large number of languages builtin). That's it, for a simple integration, not much is needed really.

There is also the amazing Ohm project [3], a toolkit for writing PEG parser and interpreters which is standalone but got its integration into Lively as well. It allows to quickly experiment with new language ideas or implement grammars/interpreters for existing languages.

[1] https://lively-web.org/core/servers/HaskellServer.js

[2] https://ace.c9.io/

[3] https://github.com/harc/ohm

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

#438

Post by brabel »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #348
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…

What an odd take. There was respect shown. Replit is not that innovative or the pioneer of this idea - many have done this so many times before Wit this silly logic, nobody can ever work for a compeitor. Was Zoom's CEO unprofessional for starting Zoom after working so long in WebEx? How about Jet.com founder after working at Amazon?

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).

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

#439

Post by allo37 »

arp242 wrote: post #262
archibaldJ wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 almo…

That part kind of surprised me: I figured pretty much every job (even internships) makes you sign some sort of noncompete agreement these days.

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

#440

Post by cycomanic »

jwilber wrote: post #166

If the CEO didn’t throw a tantrum over the exact things his company claims to support (OSS, creativity, etc.), nobody would know about the intern’s weekend project. But he did, and now we’ll see something of a Streisand effect [0]. To be fair, it is kind of suspect to intern for a company and, at the end of that internship, turn around and create effectively the same thing. And OP’s dismissive tone and propensity to…

He interned there two years ago, I would hardly call this at the end of the internship turn around.
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