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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

#551

Post by mmastrac »

cwkoss wrote: post #525
normac2 wrote: post #146

I'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…

Would it be against HN's rules to reply to Who's Hiring posts from Replit with a link to this article?

It would likely go against the spirit of the community to hound a job posting like that. I don't disagree with the sentiment, but turning the hiring posts into any sort of flamewar/off-topic discussion dilutes the value of those threads.

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

#552

Post by IshKebab »

jtouri wrote: post #490
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.

Reading this part really made my head shake. Attacking a former intern like that, why would anyone want to intern there after this?

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.

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

#553

Post by caslon »

contriban wrote: post #545
prezjordan wrote: post #540

2011: https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca...

Can you add more context? Why did you post this?

It demonstrates that he did something worse than what he's accusing his former intern of doing:

Second, we’re also excited to announce one of the first (of many!) projects that Amjad has worked on with us: Codecademy Labs, the easiest way to play with JavaScript, Ruby, and Python online. Now, after you learn with Codecademy courses, you can use Codecademy Labs to create your own programs, share them via Twitter and Facebook, and show your friends what you’ve learned.

Unlike Radon, he commercialized his "clone."

It doesn't matter morally that he cloned what his previous employer did (and it's hard to argue that Radon's tool is a clone to begin with, not that there would be anything morally wrong with it), but it does highlight his hypocrisy.

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

#554

Post by JoeOfTexas »

rdudekul wrote: post #129
rd wrote: post #7

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…

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.

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

#555

Post by robertkrahn01 »

hcs wrote: post #539
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/…

Lively Kernel all runs in the client, though, while repl.it runs the code server-side. Not that this was new, either, but it seems confusing to compare to Lively. (It's been years since I've checked out either of these projects so sorry if I'm misremembering or missing new developments.)

Not quite, Lively runs code both client side (JS, languages implemented on top of JS) as well as server side. The Lively server has a "subserver" system [1] that allows you to connect to VMs, compilers, etc.

[1] https://github.com/LivelyKernel/LivelyKernel/tree/master/cor...

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

#556

Post by trhway »

>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.

[IANAL] while not a trade secret, isn't it a straight admission of IP reuse without explicit permission (until of course Replit published that stuff under GPL or the likes)

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

#557

Post by caslon »

mypalmike wrote: post #488
bravura wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but supporting remote by offering $0 - 0 salary and 0.00% - 0.00% equity seems legit and completely transparent: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/repl-it/jobs/aihA75TQr...

Seeing that I would simply assume they didn't want to advertise specifics about salary, which is not unusual, so they entered 0 into a form. Am I missing something?

Illegal if seen by people in certain parts of the USA.

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

#558

Post by IshKebab »

munk-a wrote: post #536
devoutsalsa wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes both ways. Imagine Replit’s attorney going after OP. If OP didn’t take down the site, then suing them is going to be a huge expense & waste of time. Is Replit really gonna pay some corporate attorney $600-ish per hour to harass someone? You don’t even need a lawyer to show up in court and say “I’m a broke ass new grad, and these guys are trying to take down my website. I don’t even know why, but I’m dragging…

Law suits cost both parties a whole truckload of money - replit almost certainly has a larger war chest than you and can outlast you. It's easy to stand on the sidelines and criticize this person for not being a martyr to the cause of our terrible legal system - but, while such a lawsuit would never throw you out of your home, it could very quickly drain your personal savings which, if you have a family that's relian…

It doesn't have to cost a truckload. You can spend a truckload on lawyers if you want, but realistically, what is the maximum damages that a judge would award if replit won this case? $1k? Maybe? I wouldn't be surprised if there were lawyers willing to defend this obvious case on a no win no fee basis.

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

#559

Post by Dah00n »

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…

Well, let's hope repl.it wasn't started by someone working on the same kind of tech at another well-known brand. It would be ironic or "kind of suspect", no?

https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca...

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

#560

Post by fastball »

boothrowaway wrote: post #312
gonehome wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

Given that his name isn't even Conan, everyone should probably treat this as the baseless hearsay that it seems to be.
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