Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

intuitiveexplanations.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 1001 posts

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

#61

Post by dimgl »

finger wrote: post #52
dimgl wrote: post #12

Yeah, not sure about this one chief. I don't know the legal aspects here, but I think it makes sense to not create an open-source project that competes with your previous employer and then correspond with them letting them know you did it...

Wouldn’t this only hold if you signed a competition clause, and if so then they would have to compensate you for not being able to work on technology X for Y amount of years?

Yeah this is what I'm unsure of as it steps into the legal side of things.

In general though, doesn't it make sense to not create a free competitor right after leaving your employer? They may have a case regarding stealing trade secrets given that they did give you access to their codebase and daily ops.

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

#62

Post by whimsicalism »

dimgl wrote: post #49
whimsicalism wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this not what the CEO of repl.it did, moving from codeacademy to repl.it?

I don't know about what the CEO of repl.it did. It shouldn't matter. I only know what the author has chosen to publish on his blog post. He corresponded with his previous employer regarding a free project that competes with them. When he got a negative response he then decided to air his dirty laundry on the Internet.

> It shouldn't matter.

It matters in that it gives us a sense of what the norms are.

repl.it's differentiator isn't just being a repl that can run different languages, it hardly competes directly with them.

> When he got a negative response

when he got threatened to be sued* he posted about it, I see no reason why doing so is somehow bad form while threatening to sue is not bad form.

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

#63

Post by jawns »

gavinray wrote: post #2

Why did you take it down? And why did you apologize? I think the threat to sue was posturing, the same way that legal charges are always trumped up to get you to accept a plea. If you had let them see it through, and they intended to sue you, you could have churned up a horror-inducing PR nightmare of a shitstorm for them. If someone is really as petty to light cash on fire suing a young person with no assets over ba…

> you could have qualified for a public defender

In general, that's only for criminal matters. At least, that's what the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel pertains to.

That said, sometimes public defenders are appointed in certain limited non-criminal proceedings, but a case about intellectual property is not one where you'd qualify for a public defender.

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

#65

Post by ylyn »

dimgl wrote: post #12

Yeah, not sure about this one chief. I don't know the legal aspects here, but I think it makes sense to not create an open-source project that competes with your previous employer and then correspond with them letting them know you did it...

This person's project competes with Repl.it in the same way someone doing Nand2Tetris competes with Intel (a bit exaggerated, but the point is there).

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

#66

Post by anm89 »

zemo wrote: post #55
anm89 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, poor repl.it who's explicitly threatening to use their big bankroll to squash a small developer doing something he is passionate about it. He should just shut up and accept the validity of their effort to silence him.

it feels like you're intentionally missing the point here. If repl.it is acting as if they believe they have legal leverage, why respond by giving them more leverage?

Ah now I understand. He should just go get his own highly paid lawyers and dig down for a lengthy legal battle. His own VC guys will foot the bill!

Or he could get on the top spot of HN for free and get a massive amount of community support, potentially people who actually will foot his legal bill, for the price of a few hours of writing a blog post.

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

#67

Post by dimgl »

cole-k wrote: post #60
dimgl wrote: post #12

Yeah, not sure about this one chief. I don't know the legal aspects here, but I think it makes sense to not create an open-source project that competes with your previous employer and then correspond with them letting them know you did it...

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.

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

#68

Post by mcintyre1994 »

Exuma wrote: post #53
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…

I think the CEO is absolutely nuts here. With that said, I also think certain employees though have a very slippery mentality of this sort of vibe where they do things that might be sketchy or on the borderline not OK (but JUST on the line), and then rationalize as "but ... reason!". The tone of this whole article is very subtly reminiscent of that... the type of person that when given an inch will take 10 inches (no…

What boundary do you think they pushed though? I understand the sentiment in general, but I didn't get it here at all because I can't see anything wrong, bad or questionable that OP did.
Post reply on HN