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Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

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

#841

Post by d3nj4l »

zamalek wrote: post #307
vidarh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this was a marketing opportunity. They could've asked nicely if he'd be willing to link to repl.it for anyone who wants something more solid and scalable. It sounds from the early e-mails as if OP started out very positively predisposed towards them. Instead they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty.

> litigious and petty The unfortunate truth is that this doesn't matter. Oracle, as one recent example, is still wildly successful - even in the open source space.

Oracle lives by selling to management. Replit isn’t at a stage where it can do that - it will love and die by developer goodwill until it becomes big enough for management to want to buy it.

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

#842

Post by acituan »

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…

> Now, a lot of people implicitly assume that in a dispute between for-profit company and an open-source project, the for-profit company must be in the wrong.

All things equal, this is not a baseless assumption; not only profit maximization vs. altruistic sharing are drastically different objective functions; a funded for-profit usually has more agency, including agency to play foul. This is not a crowd that is startup naive, people are familiar with the range of stuff that happens.

That said, you've explicitly intimidated the guy with the depth of your funding, then attacked their character despite the fact that you had tried to recruit him, so we are not even operating on assumptions here.

Now you'll have to waste some of that funding on PR consultation and damage control. A lose-lose for everyone.

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

#843

Post by glenngillen »

jcrites wrote: post #771
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…

California law does not recognize non-compete agreements. Your heardquarters are in San Francisco. Good luck. Unless you have ironclad evidence that he stole intellectual property from your company you don't have a legal case to stand on. I have offered to pay the student's legal fees in exchange for putting the GitHub repository back up, with the provision of reviewing the contracts he signed with you to ensure ther…

If I remember the timelines correctly before Cloud9 there was Nitrous.io. And before that (we’re talking circa 2007 now) the original Heroku was actually a hosted IDE.

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

#844

Post by beckingz »

rurabe wrote: post #781
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…

pretty weird/low class move to build a free clone of the product you just worked on. pretty petty decision to threaten to sue your former intern for his weird move. also, threatening someone with money is a pretty surefire way to look like an asshole. similarly petty decision to spend hours documenting everything to post on HN and start throwing mud in public. everyone seems well within their legal rights but ethical…

It's not a great look, but it does demonstrate excitement about the domain.

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

#845

Post by inopinatus »

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…

Ugh. This is corporate authoritarianism at its most shameless.

Companies do not own someone’s expertise. This includes domain knowledge obtained in the course of their employment. If you wish to reserve the right to exploit an invention, patent it.

For everything else, I refer you to Intel vs NEC over the cloning of the 8086 (spoiler: Intel lost).

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

#846

Post by xpressvideoz »

sudosysgen wrote: post #790
hashbig wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I unfollowed him after he tweeted that Repl.it is the most innovative company in the world. Yeah, not SpaceX or Neuralink or Pfizer. A company that runs docker images is the most innovative company.

Pfizer doesn't really belong in that list. They applied money to an already made invention and scaled up an existing manufacturing process along with a dozen other companies. Pfizer is not even the only manufacturer of the BioNTech vaccine, nor is it the first manufacturer to express interest, nor did it take any risk. I'd say the most innovative company in the world is probably Alphabet or Samsung.

I can totally understand why Alphabet is on the list, but what is your reason for regarding Samsung as the most innovative company? Nowadays I've found them struggling to compete with their Chinese and Taiwanese opponents.

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

#847

Post by sam0x17 »

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…

> I started working on Replit (or repl.it) back when I was a student in Jordan

How would you have felt, and where would you be today if Codeacademy had threatened to sue you instead of being nurturing to your project?

The "repl" part of Replit is open source. Your argument ends there. You can't take it back. I could literally fork your repo and I'd be "copying" you by your logic.

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

#848

Post by 0x5f3759df-i »

amasad wrote: post #757

Hey everyone, I want to apologize for the inappropriate use of power here. While I do believe there is an ethical line that was crossed here, I should have called him to understand his point of view and work it out. Which is what I'll try to do now, and see if we can get his project back up again. I'm sorry Radon. The lesson for me here is to internalize how I'm no longer the struggling kid from Jordan fighting for m…

The only ethical line being crossed here is your threat of ruining this kid with legal fees if you don't get your way.

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

#849

Post by aparsons »

marcinzm wrote: post #783
amasad wrote: post #757

Hey everyone, I want to apologize for the inappropriate use of power here. While I do believe there is an ethical line that was crossed here, I should have called him to understand his point of view and work it out. Which is what I'll try to do now, and see if we can get his project back up again. I'm sorry Radon. The lesson for me here is to internalize how I'm no longer the struggling kid from Jordan fighting for m…

I've seen multiple tweets from you the last day regarding this where you definitely showed no regret and simply kept trying to prove you were in the right. Even this response tries to make people feel bad for you and divert empathy away from the person you attacked. And also implies the only reason you are relenting is because it's making the company you represent look bad. So apologies are good but this seems the we…

He deletes tweets that don’t fit his narrative (that he’s a genius building a product nobody else is capable of building) on the regular, so don’t be surprised if those tweets magically never existed by morning

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

#850

Post by ezekg »

ezekg wrote: post #594
zx2391 wrote: post #42

No offense, but I found the early replit so cool, I will replicate it as a weekend project soon.

I'm also a big fan of early repl.it. I used to be able to hit a bookmarked url and get a repl right away. But its been getting slower and slower and more complicated lately, and this whole situation left a bad taste in my mouth, and it's probably the push I need to move to an alternative. In case anybody is thinking of building -- I'd happily pay for a similar app that let's you write/share private repls, with third-…

To add some more info: I don’t want/need a file system, and I don’t care about building a web app -- rendering HTML, hosting the code in the cloud, etc., etc. -- I just want a simple console repl (what repl.it started as.)
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