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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

#721

Post by xbp »

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…

> working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they're doing

Radon outlined why this isn't true. [1]

> basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.

It appears as if you're advocating that Radon should've treated the open-source code as if it was closed? [1]

> This is incredibly unprofessional

In what world is it unprofessional to work on a personal side project that has ZERO commercial interests and is using 100% public open-source code? This is actually one of the most professional online disagreements I've ever seen..

> Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years

hUHH ???

[1] https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/evidence

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

#722

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

No, you absolutely should be afraid of lawyers. They can waste boundless amounts of time and money over bullshit nobody else cares about. In many cases lawsuits are nothing but state-sanctioned bullying and extortion. Nobody sane actually wants to waste their time and money going to court over any minor thing, only corporations can afford to do this because they have more than enough money to burn. Suing competitors into oblivion is a viable tactic even if you lose in court because it delays their profits and burns their cash reserves. Sony vs. Connectix is an example of this.

Obviously the right thing to do is to stand up to this bullshit. I have massive respect for anyone with the balls to do that. Everyone else is better off doing things as anonymously as possible. Can't sue you if nobody knows who you are.

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

#723

Post by mmastrac »

mindcrime wrote: post #702
amasad wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a clone of Replit that we made work at Codecademy. I started working on Replit (or repl.it) back when I was a student in Jordan. I didn't have a laptop so every time I wanted to get some programming done I had to setup a development environment at the university or at work. The idea for Replit was when you needed a repl to do some coding you should easily get one from anywhere including a mobile device. I th…

It copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws. That's the hallmark of copying versus merely writing one's own program to solve the same problem. Or the hallmark of having experience working in a particular domain, and simply favoring techniques and approaches that are familiar. Is there any particular reason why anybody should believe that any of these "unique, invisibl…

What's interesting is that the redacted full thread alludes to some of these invisible aspects, and Radon appears to have a justification for doing things that way (though it's all blacked out so we cannot evaluate the merits of that argument).

https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2

https://github.com/replit/upm is likely one of the blacked-out bits in that email, as Radon says he wrote the README.

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

#724

Post by tomnipotent »

amasad wrote: post #682
tommoor wrote: post #634

> 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 I'll just leave this here so we can all bask in the insane hypocrisy of this entire episode. https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca... Edit: See Amjad's response below – seems Repl.it may have pre-dated this hiri…

That was a clone of Replit that we made work at Codecademy. I started working on Replit (or repl.it) back when I was a student in Jordan. I didn't have a laptop so every time I wanted to get some programming done I had to setup a development environment at the university or at work. The idea for Replit was when you needed a repl to do some coding you should easily get one from anywhere including a mobile device. I th…

> a lot of people implicitly assume

Considering your existing cred, I'm sure many in the community would give you the benefit of the doubt if addressed the issue head-on and explained what was infringed instead of what reads as emotionally charged responses. And if you're holding out for legal reasons, I imagine that would make the community more outraged because it escalates an accidental bad faith incident into a intentional one.

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

#725

Post by thefunnyman »

fleddr wrote: post #714
kyawzazaw wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not personal details. It was relevant [professional] correspondence and you can see how professional the student was. In contrast to the CEO, who said along the lines - we got a lot of money and we have lawyers.

Somebody name and photo are personal details. Combined with a public post including accusations means a wide open attack on somebody's character. Don't get me wrong, in no way would I defend that guy or any of his words. That's not the point. My point is that private communications are expected to remain private, even more so in a work dispute. Or so is my belief. Which seems an outdated belief.

He’s the CEO corresponding over his company email so this is pretty clearly a professional setting rather than a personal one. His name and photo are very publicly associated with the company already.

I generally agree with your sentiment at an emotional level, as most of the time I find it to be in poor taste to share private conversations, however there’s not really an expectation of privacy in professional correspondence. For instance your company can freely monitor what you do on your work laptop if so inclined.

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

#726

Post by zmmmmm »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #68
Exuma wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly there is nothing technically or legally wrong but I would say this was bad faith by the intern in a minor way. Like, its just not nice nor smart to do things that act against the interests of those that have put faith and trust in you. In this case, he's created a web site that at a surface level makes Replit look trivial to implement - boasts that in a weekend or two he's supported massively more languages. And absolutely, part of his knowledge as to how to do it came from what he probably learned there. So intentionally or not, he's done something that hurts the interests of his former employer.

So if you hired an electrician to fix a light bulb and then after they left they told everyone your house sucked. Illegal? no. Unprofessional? yes, slightly. Would you hire them again? no. Would you sue them? that would be ridiculous.

On balance, the CEO is clearly the one more in the wrong here and definitely acting in a dumb way. I would run away from investing in this company with him at the helm. But I would say there is a little bit of bad faith on the other side here too.

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

#728

Post by abarrettwilsdon »

rwmj wrote: post #45

How did Replit manage to raise $20m for something as trivial as "a webapp you can use to run code online in different programming languages"? I assume that it's something a bit more than that?

6m users¹? Smooth and sharable UX? Effective abstractions over many parts of the DevOps stack?

This comment has quite the Dropbox 'build such a system yourself quite trivially' comment energy

¹ https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1394002500508807168

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

#729

Post by fleddr »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #694
fleddr wrote: post #679

I naturally sympathize with underdogs and this seems a classic case of bullying and power abuse. That said, this trend where such disputes are made public including personal details continues to shock me. It must be my European perspective. In particular, just screen grabbing personal conversations and publishing them to the world without permission, with the person's full name, and then adding accusations...I find a…

Not personal details. It was relevant [professional] correspondence and you can see how professional the student was. In contrast to the CEO, who said along the lines - we got a lot of money and we have lawyers.

Replying here to your other comment:

"however there’s not really an expectation of privacy in professional correspondence"

Uhm, yes there is. Internal company email as well as email between companies is expected to stay between the sender and receivers. Almost every corporate email footer mentions this explicitly.

I'm quite convinced that neither employers or employees would be cool with their emails being dumped on the internet for all to see. Every time that happens, it creates headlines.

Professional correspondence is very much expected to stay confined to its intended scope.

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

#730

Post by tmotwu »

mindcrime wrote: post #702
amasad wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a clone of Replit that we made work at Codecademy. I started working on Replit (or repl.it) back when I was a student in Jordan. I didn't have a laptop so every time I wanted to get some programming done I had to setup a development environment at the university or at work. The idea for Replit was when you needed a repl to do some coding you should easily get one from anywhere including a mobile device. I th…

It copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws. That's the hallmark of copying versus merely writing one's own program to solve the same problem. Or the hallmark of having experience working in a particular domain, and simply favoring techniques and approaches that are familiar. Is there any particular reason why anybody should believe that any of these "unique, invisibl…

I am not sure I agree. The topic of intellectual property and trade secrets in software, or if IP laws should even apply, is probably another discussion entirely. However, there's no reason to trivialize it to cutthroat copy and pasted code. If Radon was a state actor, I am unsure HN would be responding the same way here.

Obviously, knowledge learned from mistakes or design discussions from one's time at another company is no issue. The intern seemed to have worked on a project very limited in scope to the overall product (package management). It is quite possible the bells and whistles that Replit's CEO is claiming that is copied are taken from design documents made by someone else - which is not at all learnings from working around a particular domain. In my opinion, this might actually be problematic. I don't think Radon was being malicious here, but you might also want to consider that Radon is a fresh graduate and might not have fully considered the implications of where it is acceptable for him to draw designs from.

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