that amjad guy sounds like an entitled piece of shit who thinks he knows what innovation is and that he has anything to with it. lold.
Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
951–960 of 1001 posts
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#952Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does it have to be original to be a product people will pay for? There are plenty of unoriginal yet profitable products. What you've said is all true, but most users today don't use computers like that. Arguably developers already do if they have SSH access somewhere, but if repl.it brings that experience to a general audience via a web browser then it's already valuable. If the Chrome cloud VM idea[1] can raise…
> Why does it have to be original to be a product people will pay for? No, no; for that it absolutely doesn't. People pay for all sorts of goods that are not original, like loaves of bread, pairs of sneakers or T-shirts. It had better be original if you're going to harass former interns that they're ripping off some intellectual property, and threaten them with lawyers. That's all.
Sorry, my reply was a bit too aggressive and I jumped to conclusions about what you meant.
You're right, though I still think repl.it has some right to be protective of their IP here. The originality of the service is in the ease of use and modernizing the old timesharing idea, so while they were quick to mention legal action and acted obnoxiously to their former intern, they're right to be weary of something that looks so similar to their product and judging from the emails even in the implementation details.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#953> 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…
Counterpoint: be afraid of lawyers. They may not be able to win s judgment against you, but they can easily bankrupt you. Remember the case where a man criticized Proctorio and was hit with a SLAPP lawsuit aimed to silence him. He ended up spending 100k on legal costs and the case is only beginning. He would have been bankrupt despite being 100% legally in the right. Fortunately for him, EFF decided to support him af…
Countercounter point: do not be afraid of lawyers, be _very_ afraid of legal systems.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#954How 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
> 6m users
Is the plan to lose money on each user until they reach profitability? How do they plan to make money?
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#955> 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…
Fwiw this won't have happened (a similarly? designed copycat) if Replit's infrastructure was open source. A good example of this model is how GitLab still succeeds even if it is open source that other people are free to host.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#956Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's kinda funny how their CEO writes on Twitter all the time that they are the best company in the world, with the best product, do most innovations in tech etc and 10 minutes later he is threatened by a small open-source project that wasn't even created to compete.
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…
Right, I get the same impression from Replit. I don't know why I got subscribed to some weird accelerator newsletter they started and the wording is akin to the nigerian prince scam (and as a side note a REPL website creating an accelerator for sure gives me some dotcom bubble vibes).
I'm sure there are a lot of incredibly clever startup founders out there but I get the impression that more than not you attract founders that are more interested in the status rather than the innovation aspect. I said status not money as a lot of the time these folks don't really care about money as long as they can add a "Founder of X, an YC funded company" on their profile and share their next viral tweet, with lots of adjectives, lots of buzzwords and no depth. Startup funding became a game of convincing others that you as a person deserve the funding, not the company itself.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#957Hey 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…
You're apologetic now only after this thing blew up on the internet. Mister hyper-inflated ego CEO wouldn't have thought twice about apologising if your ex-intern wouldn't have made the issue public. Get bent, mate and try selling your bullshit somewhere else.
Should've used those "big money" to buy humility classes, not "top laywers" to threaten ex-interns.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#958Earlier quoted context omitted.
The lesson here is to ask people for advice before writing public statements (for one), and before threatening with lawsuits in private communication. 1) You apologize, but basically the other person did something wrong? 2) You invoke sympathy for being a "struggling kid from Jordan fighting for more than a decade to build something" ; so what? So now you're the victim? Your reaction to all of this is comedy gold. Hi…
I think people should have more humility. Yes, he was wrong to be a jerk over email and threaten his former intern. However, apologizing for bad behavior and stating what you will do to correct it is what we should hope people who act inappropriately do. When they do act this way, it's wrong to heap more scorn on them, even if it does feel good. Have you ever been obnoxious to anyone? How would you hope others would…
By not making a manipulative “apology” that tries to still put the blame on the victim and cast myself as the real victim.
Textbook abusive behavior.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#959Hey 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…
You're apologetic now only after this thing blew up on the internet. Mister hyper-inflated ego CEO wouldn't have thought twice about apologising if your ex-intern wouldn't have made the issue public. Get bent, mate and try selling your bullshit somewhere else.
Use that "lot of money" to get top PR instead of "top lawyers", and maybe some "getting head out of ass" classes, cause humility and decency is something clearly you won't be able to learn.
Re: Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
#960Hey 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 believe in your apology, and thank you for trying to make things right. Everyone makes mistakes. What's done is done. We can only learn from it. It's easy to become emotional and protective of a project you've poured blood and tears into, which probably kept you up at nights, amidst all the FUD. At the end of the day, the world is better with Replit than without it. A world where any kid can learn to program with a…
lol they shouldn’t