What a loser, never using replit again and advising my dev network to never touch it.
Definitely will not consider it for my team.
Don’t be scared of them. They are scums.
Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
81–90 of 1001 posts
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#82This sounds to me like naivete. Even if ideas were all publicly available on blog posts, there are existing competitors, and your project is open source, creating a copy of what you worked on as an intern is certainly in poor taste.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#83A 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.
Clearly their investors should have funded the intern!
That's part of why someone is a threat to your moat. You don't assume that a good rival effort will go unnoticed by investors and customers.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#84The threats seem directly at odds with the CEOs tweet here https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401617251464138754 This whole saga is pretty sad really. While replit isn't doing very much in wrapping these languages in a frontend (and something that is clearly straightforward to replicate), they are doing all the work that comes with scaling that to many users on the web (I guess that includes moderation). They should…
[deleted]
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#85They realized you had the potential of taking away some of their traffic. Traffic lets them sell data, charm investors, and maybe improve their service to a limited extent by analyzing that data. What do they have to lose by bullying you, since they have lawyers on the payroll already? You could ask a lawyer if you have a chance to win in court. Perhaps the EFF would like to grind their teeth on Replit and create a p…
> They realized you had the potential of taking away some of their traffic.
Understandable... but bullying people via email will take away even more traffic from their site (because of bad reputation) if the conversation goes public (as it usually happens).
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#86I won't be using Replit any more; I'd like to use this instead though. I'm not supporting OSS suppression of any kind, especially for something so basic, fundamental and useful.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#87Why 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…
[deleted]
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#88Earlier 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.
The area that seemed gray here particularly was the "internal decisions part." As someone who has designed maybe... 40+ interfaces, I know the tremendous amount of effort and thought that goes into the simple placement of a button being on the left or the right, with huge impacts to usability and user experience.
So when he posts a few images of other sites that "look" similar, I don't quite buy the fact that he didn't liberally borrow from the many hours of decisions by Repli. Thats purely a guess though, and I could absolutely be wrong.
I would imagine it would be easy for the author to rationalize it in his head that "well, lots of other sites have a button in the top row I can do it too!" and in effect, ends up copying a lot of Replit features without innovating on them simply because other sites "look similar"
I picture myself as a CEO seeing a previous employee with something that is very clearly using a lot of the decisions we worked out together, and then see a list of 20 bullet points trying to rationalize why it's ok, that would be super irritating to me, but that would be the limit of it. Definitely not worthy of anything more than a polite conversation, that's for sure.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#89Why 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…
>> I say this as someone who isn't a stranger to the courts and judicial system.
I question this is you are saying that welcoming a lawsuit is a good idea for a side project. That could be years of expensive headaches for literately zero gain other than being able to say I get to keep my side project up.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#90Publishing an open source project with functionality that is this close to the core functionality of a company you are working for seems to be Ill advised.
It's usually not that difficult to keep work and passion projects clearly separate so that no one could be confused.