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 thought it would benefit many people, especially those who don't have the means to buy expensive computers.
It took 2 years of work to get something working and in 2011 we launched on HN (2011 web archive snapshot here https://web.archive.org/web/20111007050930/http://repl.it/ and HN launch here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3056490). It was the first of its kind and it inspired a lot of projects and still does today. It was totally open-source (https://github.com/replit-archive/repl.it) and after the launch it was used as infrastructure by Codecademy (which later employed me) and Udacity and many others to deliver interactive coding in the browser. I was thrilled about that.
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. But there is some line that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product (if you don't believe that, you can stop reading now, because no argument will convince you) and I think to someone who knew Replit's architecture well, this project would clearly be across it. 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.
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 there is no terms that he could be violating, after review with my own lawyers.
I was also considering working for your company when considering changing forms, but I never would after hearing about this episode.
Your remarks about "YC shouldn't fund copycats" are especially ironic given that Repl.it is by far not the first company to make programming online easy to do. I was involved in acquisition of Cloud9.io (now AWS Cloud9 IDE – the original site has been taken down from the Wayback Machine but you can see plenty of their work in articles if you search Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=cloud9+io+startup ) – they provided an online IDE, terminal, full Linux environment, and the ability to program in many different programming languages.
Personally, I don't have an enmity against copying. If you copy what another company does and execute better, that's progress. Amazon.com was just the Sears catalog with a website and faster shipping. But it's sadly ironic that you have this negative view against idea-copying while your own company is dense in a space of competitors that offer online code editing and evaluation – some of which have already exited, as I mentioned above.
I'll happily contribute to a GoFundMe for the defense. I haven't made it through all of the comments, but I wonder if this isn't a case the EFF would be interested in.
I think the EFF is mainly interested in cases that are strong enough for a useful precedent to be set by fighting them
Happy to contribute as well, if a GoFundMe / some other crowd fund is set up.
OP, if you choose to bring the project back up, please reach out. I know some college professors who may be interested to be your first customers.
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.
People tend to forget that Heroku exists.
We may not have forgotten that Heroku exists, but we may have forgotten that Heroku was an IDE. At least, I wasn't aware of it. Are there old screenshots of what it looked like?
https://techcrunch.com/2008/02/07/heroku-lifts-ruby-on-rails...
Nitrous was action.io before that but it was like 2012, the company I confounded Codeanywhere, which was originally named PHPanywhere started in 2008.
Just some Cloud IDE history
> I was also considering working for your company when considering changing forms, but I never would after hearing about this episode.
Some personal reflection might be in order here before making harsh judgements. Your current employer (Facebook, according to your bio) has done far worse far many times, wouldn't you agree?
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, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture" constitute any kind of genuine "intellectual property" in either a legal OR moral sense??
I mean, if you're arguing that he literally copied copyrighted code, then sure, OK, maybe you have something. But nebulous appeals to "design decisions?" Don't expect many people to have sympathy for that. At some point you're treading into "anybody who ever worked for a company making cars can never work for another car company" or "A guy who makes a new chair owes money to everyone who ever built a chair" territory.
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.
I find it telling that Radon wrote out an extensive explanation of why he believes his project is not based on replit, and Amjad basically responds with "you're wrong, you copied it" without addressing anything Radon said.
To be fair, there’s only a few ways to say that the correct solution seems obvious in hindsight.
I agree with Amjad there. I just don’t think that working with something means you can never use those patterns again. That’s ridiculous. If I couldn’t use any of the patterns that I learned about in previous jobs I would still be programming as if I had 1 year of university experience.
Have you read Radon's redacted email that goes over the technical details? It doesn't look like post-hoc rationalization.
Yeah, I did, but not sure what you mean here?
What I mean is that it doesn't seem like this is a "the correct solution seems obvious in hindsight" situation based on Radon's technical explanation of his project.
"It is unethical and would be obviously so to outside observers as well. Feel free to consult with your mentors or people with more experience than you in the industry."
Wow. Amjad basically invited Radon to post about this online.
And it comes across as very condescending imo. We are in a world where a brilliant intern may know or sense as well as any CEO, from YC or not. That what makes this world interesting.
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.
I would have been willing to buy that if Amjad wasn’t clearly being a major ass here. He basically prejudiced me to take Radon’s side, regardless of the merits of the argument.
Yeah, I think Amjad would be fully justified in saying “Hey, I’m not comfortable with this. I don’t think keeping that website up is worth throwing away a strong reference from the CEO of a highly funded company - do you?”.
A reference/relationship like that is worth a lot more than a project that is a little sketchy. No matter what happens, I think the intern has taken a net loss from this whole fiasco.
There isn’t a lot of value in a “good reference” from someone with a bad character.
On the other hand, What has Amjad lost today in terms of personal reputation?
Can’t say I agree with your assessment of who’s finished the day with a net loss.
Amjad would have been a pretty amazing reference before this incident (and I’m 80% sure it’s blown over at this point…)
> I don’t think keeping that website up is worth throwing away a strong reference from the CEO of a highly funded company - do you?
Why does it have to be in this tone? It's honestly even worse because it would put himself on a pedestal.
If he was truly worried he could simply have a conversation about said worry. You are just reframing to a different threat.
Its not a good way to settle disagreements by making threats as you outline here. I think your suggestion is as bad a way of handling this as the original way. Why not react positively, re-state your intent to hire the intern, say that this is indeed interesting for the company - and because of that - could you please make it not public (against a bonus) and maybe keep working on it inside repl.it.
I'll concede that it's a fuzzy line at times. But nothing I've heard so far here strikes me as justifying a belief that this case falls into "obviously theft of some kind of IP" category. OTOH, I'm biased as I am not generally a fan of the idea of "IP" in general, so there's that...
Yea, we may never know. If Replit just went ahead and filed a lawsuit and presented their case in front of an actual court, that would shed light on the legitimacy of their claims. Some posters has offered to help pay for his defense. Optics would still be pretty bad since no intern should go through that. But a little better since there would be a lot less doubt.
Unfortunately, they must now face the court of public opinion, which has not had the best track record lately.
repl.it has been a project I've admired and recommended for a long time. The same can be said for many members of this community.
A few reasons why there's so much anger, in my estimation:
- When you support a project, you want its leaders to embody decent values.
- You have always projected an image of someone who's "nice" and doing things right. You cannot bully your intern in private and keep that image.
- Most importantly, you are now in the Goliath position and you are acting tyrannically. It's hard to side with someone going "I have raised $20M and I will use it to crush you" to their previous intern. The fact that you did not explain your concerns, jumped straight to legal threats, and did not want to talk after the project was taken down looks quite bad. If you had approached it in a more diplomatic fashion, you would not be public enemy #1 on HN.
Understand the position you're in. You wield a big stick; speak softly.
P.S. it's perfectly understandable that you'd have concerns about the project, though IMHO it's an overreaction. That's not the issue. The issue is _how_ you approached it.
Thank you -- this is really good feedback.
It is great feedback. Feedback that you failed to execute on in a spectacular manner. You've lost my group as customers today. In no way will I knowingly support a founder with such a broken perspective on prior art.
This is toxic. The man made a gracious response.
Unfortunately the crowd has turned into a mob... not the first time we’ve seen this. Wait for the cooldown and hire a PR professional.
Toxic in what way? It's OK for the CEO to publicly fly off the handle expecting this to go away due to his big stick he now wields because he's successfully leveraged the work of giants to his own fortune?
A gracious response? No. His apology was not an apology at all. His apology can be distilled down to: "I'm sorry, but I'm still right - and I'm only sorry because the community has called me on it."
Toxic? Or warped perception?
He read the feedback (or at least replied) 3 hours ago. Give him time. Hopefully he’s acknowledging that comment well and we will be hearing from him again soon.
toxic in the sense of appropriateness. your response isn't crazy, but as a response to some one graciously accepting critical feedback it doesn't make much sense. frankly a top level post would have been more appropriate. I think the specific idea at play here is that people should be able to apologize, or at least acknowledge some one criticizing them, without that becoming an avenue for attack. I mean, do you want to participate in a scenario where the only rational response is to simply not engage?
I've been around a while and I've found that it's rather rare a person will try to intimidate or belittle a person on the same day they have an epiphany of their own failings all without external influence. In this situation the CEO is forced to confront perspective that isn't aligned with his. He's got two options at this point: the first is to acknowledge where he made mistakes and truly apologize the second is damage control - I think he attempted the latter. When you look through his history his apology is exactly as I described. His intention is to squash both problems while leaving the door open to an end game his lawyer(s) have counselled him on, potentially after the scrutiny subsides.
Also, my intention of responding in line was appropriate in my opinion. The parent to the CEOs comment was very well defined. The CEO made reference to it being good advice. In my opinion publicly acknowledging good advice without following through on it seems hypocritical. That's my opinion.
Finally, appropriateness seems to be an odd argument given all of the public inappropriateness from the CEO directly. The CEO has had many openings to right his wrong at this point, yet has not seemed to have been able to bring himself to execute on that.
Let's be honest here... Failure to talk to someone about it and then being forced by publicity to do so - is forced, thus inherently disingenuous.
With the backdrop of publicity - I just don't buy the apology. Maybe next time Amjad will be better, but now - he's on the hook.
yeah we were talking about repl.it earlier today at work and wanting to increase our usage of it and this is really souring me
Really? How did he fail to execute on it?
Hi Amjad, thanks for taking the time to respond. Can you please talk to Radon and work with him to remove the offending "unique and invisible" aspects, to make it so he can put his project back up? There must be some way to make it so that these projects can co-exist without causing any trouble, and it can probably done in a way that is much cheaper than bringing a lawsuit.
Done.
>It copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws.
And yet you haven’t managed to tell anyone what these “invisible” aspects are. So it kind of just sounds like you’re making things up.
What right does the public have to know this? None. It's their secret sauce, it's reasonable they don't want to publicize it.
Obviously, Radon has every right to know. But not us.
They made claims and threatened legal action; certainly the public doesn’t need to legally know until a lawsuit is actually brought, but they would be required to present such evidence to the public in court.
Do they have to currently? No, of course not. But this isn’t someone claiming that another did something behind closed doors to bait public disclosure. They opened this door by making the claims, from a standpoint of whether one might want to do business with replit in the future it’s entirely reasonable to ask for proof of what otherwise are slanderous claims.
You don’t have to reveal your trade secrets in open court. They can be shown to the judge “in camera” and redacted from public filings.
If all you had to do to get a company to reveal all its secrets were to sue it on some plausible legal theory and conduct discovery, everyone would do it.
>You don’t have to reveal your trade secrets in open court
well excellent that we're not in a court here on HN or Twitter then. If he decides to intimidate someone without putting any concrete evidence up for it we're well within our rights to drag him over the coals for it. Dogs that bark don't bite, if he wanted to avoid this he should have gone to his lawyers directly, instead he's already issuing half-baked apologies in this very thread. Which means he has zilch and just wanted to bully a recent graduate into taking his product off the internet.
Sure, Public - None, the accused as in Radon has absolute full right. You can't simply make an allegation and not back it up
If the CEO had engaged with Radon in a rational civilized manner the situation would have never reached this stage.
their secret sauce for... things they consider flaws?
Flaws being copied is a hallmark sign of copying something verbatim.
Right, and then to demonstrate it, you reveal what was copied.
The project is open source. The public already knows. His proposed plan of action, a lawsuit, would also bind him to make those details public.
Could you explain roughly what was the biggest tell that he copied Replit's architecture patterns? No need to go into details, but perhaps this would make your side of the story more clear.
So far we only have seen Radon's post and emails screenshots. He seems to be very adamant about not copying any of Replit's IP. But clearly every story has two sides and I think it's very important to hear yours. Hopefully it will come in the form of a blog post or similar.
Genuinely curious and not taking sides with anyone here. I just believe that the OSS community can learn from this.
Copied or not, if he signed a non-compete, he is violating the agreement. His project absolutely competes with Replit. Do you agree with this?
Noncompetes are illegal and unenforceable in California, where Repl.it is incorporated. So if he signed a noncompete, it would actually be Repl.it that is in the wrong here, not him.
I am not sure they are 'illegal' - do you have a source for this? That being said, most non-competes are not enfoceable in Californina that's true. And that is a very good thing imo and a net positive for innovation.
According to the California Business and Professions Code Section 16600, “every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.”
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
This does not make contracts containing such clauses "illegal", but rather unenforceable in court. The student could sign a contract saying "I will not work on a company that competes with Repl.it", and he did, and the company tried to sue him over it with that as the only claim, then the court would quickly grant a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
for reference: https://www.rhdtlaw.com/non-compete-california
See my response; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27429135
After years have passed, on a noncommercial project?
You should know by now that non-competes mean diddly squat.
Why do you keep posting about non-competes when they are not a factor in California, which is where this occurred?
I didn't actually know that. I stand corrected about that. But it's still arguably "morally wrong". Especially if Replit's unique design decisions and/or secrets are incorporated into this, as is claimed.
> But it's still arguably "morally wrong".
According to who? You? Hundreds of people in this thread disagree with you. As does the law.
As a thought experiment, if you ran a business, and all your ex-employees released a free version of the same product, would you be cool with this? Could you hang out with them, smile and say everything is totally cool?
Or would you want to ask them to not release free versions of your paid product?
>As a thought experiment, if you ran a business, and all your ex-employees released a free version of the same product, would you be cool with this? Could you hang out with them, smile and say everything is totally cool?
I've actually seen this exact situation play out twice (except the new products were not free), though I wasn't directly involved. Both times, it only happened because the business owner was, to put it bluntly, a bad person who had no business (heh) running a company, and the result was a mass exodus that birthed a direct competitor.
To answer your thought experiment:
I am looking at this as an employee, as a controlled person. You are looking at it as a founder, owner, or some other type of position that holds power. A controller.
Those with power would view it as immoral. An action like this threatens their power. Those who have enough power to exert a controlling influence, want, above all else, to maintain that power, while also increasing it. Anything that impedes that is unfair, and thus immoral.
Those without power, or with less power, do not see it as immoral, because it is a redistribution of power to those who deserve it just as much, if not more. It is fair. It is just. It is moral.
You see this as immoral because your sympathies lie with those who have power. Might makes right. The states that enforce non-competes have the same view as you, but California does not, and that is one of the many reasons that it remains the global center of technological innovation.
Rather than looking at it from the view of an employee or founder with power, I am attempting to view it through the lens of a good relationship between two people, with this being mainly defined through the golden rule - treating others as one wants to be treated.
It would seem to me that if I hadn't chosen to train and work with this person, he probably wouldn't have chosen this exact product to release out of all the possibilities in the world.
Let's say that he had an innate inclination for this exact product and would have done it even if he hadn't worked for me. Even then, he wouldn't have been privvy to the various and more detailed information that you are exposed to as an insider.
Going forward, I would be wary of any information I share with this person, given that it could work against me. This would definitely harm our relationship, and I would wish that this person would not do this to me.
If this were a fishing village, and the main thing to do around here was fishing, I would understand. There's not much choice there. But given that there are many different things this person could have worked on besides my exact product, my reaction would be, 'really man?'
Does your interpretation of the golden rule involve browbeating with unfounded legal threats that wouldn't stand up in court?
That legal threat was not a good response. I think both sides messed up here.
It seems like the ex-intern made an honest mistake especially given his age. This isn't exactly the same but Helen Keller messed up and plagiarised when she was young before. People do dumb things, especially when they're young.
Why should people leave your company and start something new if they are happy in their position right now?
Most of the time, this kind of "exodus" happens because the business somehow mismanaged their employees which resulted in them not being happy, leaving the business and opening up a new one.
Even then, if I knew my business would be superior, I wouldn't mind that much. In the case of repl.it I don't see any reason why Riju would pose even the tiniest threat. It's super basic with no obvious plans to be compete with repl.it. Just look at the polish of both products, one is a serious business with funding secured while the other one is a small OS web-app written by somebody in their free time.
There is a small (to your point, pretty small) risk that it could be used in place of repl.it or inspire other competitors. If this was done by an outsider, this would be totally fine and healthy for consumers.
However, this is someone that the business helped out. One would hope that the person would reciprocate with positive value for the business, rather than negative value in the form of risk.
If you are interested I wrote another response alluding to the golden rule in a reply close by: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27431326
"As a thought experiment"
=
"The actual situation is indefensible, so let's argue a situation of my choosing which is."
The thought experiment is meant to take the situtation to the logical extreme, something that is unlikely to happen yet still realistically possible, in order to more clearly understand the effects of the behavior.
E.g. one guy littering isn't so big a deal, but it's clearer that littering is bad if everyone does it because the planet will get filthy fast.
Actually, I apologize. I don't think Radon's actions were morally wrong. I take that back. I can't edit my original comment.
The only beef I had was the non-compete agreement, which I believe is illegal in California.
If, in fact, there were any plausible argument that it was morally wrong, we would not have a written statute specifically, actionably defending it.
Rather, making threats over what amounts to it, at someone not equipped to face even such a specious attack, is clearly and indefensibly morally wrong. Shame on Replit, and shame on you for supporting them.
Any company that has $20M in the bank but could possibly be threatened just by a new college grad coding alone does not deserve to exist. Give the money back to the investors and close up shop.
Non-competes are morally wrong
Strong competition has been a net positive for the tech ecosystem in my opinion and what has made SV what it is today.
Replit leadership and team should focus on winning by building faster and better, not by artificially blocking innovation.
Instead of blaming the readers, Why not just explain the legal merits of your accusation on Radon?
>"Replit version had the same run button placement tho".
Seriously? Is this something to be expected from someone who claims to be an open-source evangelist? It seems like as soon as you received the email from Radon on his project, You sent it to your lawyers and asked them for few pointers to threaten this kid to take down a 'potential' competitor.
Besides, The funding related statements in your threat clearly motivates the reader to consider that you really don't have anything of legal merit to blame Radon of copying Replit.
P.S. We had a small exchange earlier last month[1] regarding your new cryptocurrency fund for small projects/startups, Which I eventually added to my curated list of startup tools after informing you. I'm removing that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135573
No one is assuming anything. That's your email there where you bullied the guy. You could have been nice about it but instead you wanted to intimidate him by threatening to sue him. If you wanna make this right I think you should acknowledge that you overreacted and apologize to him.
> 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.
Would you also like to share with the YC community that you were not alone in working on the idea of Replit while you were in Jordan. You might want to give Max some credit mate. Give credit where credit is due. Good luck with your endeavors.
Max Shawabkeh was one of the first engineers working on Repl.it and is hardly given any credit
This is a talk he gave back in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfxH-JDF7Xk&t=81s
https://replit.com/talk/ask/Who-is-Max-Shawabkeh/26386
Utterly appalling. It was only a matter of time when all this would catch up with you.
> 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.
If the author was maliciously crossing the ethical line, why they would show the project privately to you? If the author was not maliciously crossing the ethical line, why were you so quick to threaten legal action and bully them by mentioning that you had the money to make it dangerous for them?
They might if they were seeking approval to show as later evidence.
The phrase that comes to mind is "Xanatos Gambit" https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit
So your proof that he copied a source code in the project is you saying that “if you are not convinced by my accusation which I didn’t prove, then stop reading because nothing will convince you”. have you missed logic class? no one told you before that the burden of proof is on the accuser?
> there is some line that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product
Depending on the severity of the offense and the circumstances this would make sense, but this was just a small project, not an entire VC-backed service. Would you be willing to provide concrete evidence to show that the intern was actually copying the specifics of your product? As it stands many of us are not convinced that this is the case. What are these "unique, invisible aspects" of Replit that you are referring to which are so integral to merit legal action from you? And do you believe it was justified against a project that was never even intended to be anything more than a hobbyist activity?
There's a big difference between hard-won technology (worthwhile protecting with patents, or trade secret law) and "this is how we designed this iteration of the project." Of course your implementation is secret (because it's closed source). That doesn't make it valuable enough to sue over, unless you want to be in the same camp as the asshats at Oracle / SCO.
If you didn't seriously consider obtaining patents for your efforts (and then decide to keep them as trade secrets, for whatever reason) then they're probably not valuable enough to jumpstart lawyers.
At the moment, I think you've done a fair amount of damage to your company's reputation. If I were on your board, we would be having some hard conversations right now.
this is disappointing behaviour. are there any alternatives to repl.it one can recommend? I don't want to use it anymore.
There is https://ideone.com. I compared several similar services last year, including repl.it of course. I liked ideone better for some reason I forgot. PS: I have just checked repl.it again. Its UI has been changed a lot and it seems to require signup now, which makes me even less likely to use it.
I hear there’s this project called Ruji that has more than 200 languages.
Unfortunately it seems to be taken down.
codesandbox.io is quite good too
What is the specific legal accusation that you're making here? Contract violation? Copyright violation? Patent violation? Trade secret theft?
Ethical lines are not legally relevant.
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).
I wouldn't recommend attempting a rebuttal when you've just hit the top 30 HN posts of all time. Pretty much your best option is to apologize.
> 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.
Ideon existed since 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20091214124037/http://ideone.com...
there is some line that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product
I wonder how many YC startups came about from employees of a company failing to get buy-in from their employer about a better way to solve a problem and leaving to start their own company to do it. Many of those will surely have copied large aspects of their former employers' products, including the flaws.
Do you feel the same about Zoom's CEO and Jet.com's CEO?
Probably not, since they have more money and can’t be outlawyered like an intern could.
This is what it boils down to, isn't it? No one bats an eye when an employee of some large company switches to another competitor of noticeable size.
But a single person is obviously easy to stomp into submission, and in this case it appears to have happened out of pettiness, a suspicion that is really brought home by the quick threats and the weird "work for us...no wait you were a bad co-worker anyway!" bait and switch.
Yes! It boils down to "I can pay money, so that you would need to pay money, and since I have more money, you'll go bankrupt quicker."
I'm not all too sure about American laws, but in Europe Amjad's argumentation, especially about "design decisions" is very weak. So it seems, that it's not about even having a stronger legal case. Just the ability to throw money at the problem.
with regard to ethics, two plausibly valid options:
either you believe that people should act ethically even if that means forgoing actions that they are legally allowed to make. if you believe that, isn't it wrong to build a free, open source competitor using all the knowledge you just got from working inside a company?
or:
you believe that business is the law of the jungle, and everyone is free to do whatever they can get away with legally. in which case why is it a problem for amasad to get lawyers involved?
it seems this dude's victimization relies on holding amasad to a higher standard of ethics than he holds himself. maybe he should because he has more money and power. or maybe not?
sorry, at what point do we have to watch this guy bully an ex intern and be OK with it? your example does not make sense and frankly you should probably not structure arguments in this way. its good for making people feel like they are wrong, its not good for convincing anyone you are right.
Hey dude. I understand things might be running a bit emotional for everyone right now. You might find it interesting that PG has written tangentially on this topic a few years ago. Might be an interesting take, given the distance in space/time.
http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html
PG seems to agree with Amjad's decisions.
https://imgur.com/a/WkpHk0n
Wow. Unbelievable. This whole situation is so depressing. By supporting the CEO, is PG arguing that some employee from Facebook couldn't leave the company and make a better social media? This is such a stupid idea that I am almost believing that maybe I am misunderstanding my opponents. If an ex-employee declared his intent to build a similar product to my company, I would probably feel threatened, but in no way I would make any move to avoid that, otherwise I could be correctly labeled as a selfish loser. It's society that will ultimately lose if such an enterprise is faced with legal adversaries. The correct response is to continue building a better product. Fuck non-competitive agreements. People should be free to pursue their passion and what they enjoy doing.
What has happened to YC?
Multiple recent companies are making the rounds with clear unethical behavior: Repl.it, TripleByte, Lambda School. A founder seems to be unreasonably kicked from bookface. Meanwhile PG and friends show support for these actions while waxing on about how they are extremely particular about the moral compass of founders.
Eh. I don't really expect every single YC company to be a bastion of moral integrity. Startups/hackers trying to disrupt industry are gonna do unconventional shit, and that might be more morally grey than usual. Also, given that YC has _thousands_ of alumni... of course there are going to be a few bad apples. The interview is literally 10 minutes long - its not like they're doing a deep character check on founders.
All that said, Dark and Prolific being kicked out of YC yet PG apparently supporting Replit is... making me wonder why the fuck PG wrote those articles.
>Startups/hackers trying to disrupt industry are gonna do unconventional shit
I'm always finding it very odd when people act like this - as if there was some super power involved.
PG will say what he needs to say for his investments to pan out. He’s even written a desperate essay on Mighty’s behalf when their reception was less than stellar. I wouldn’t read into his opinions that much.
An opinion you state because it benefits you is an opinion you hold.
That you don't _really_ believe it matters to nobody but yourself.
No, I think this is unfair. I "like" most Twitter replies that make me think, even if I personally don't like it. Unless pg has said something, we can't infer any intent from a button.
Well, you can, of course. But I wouldn't bet money you're right.
It'd be interesting to know what pg thinks, since he vouched for Amjad in the first place. But the whole "X liked Y, so X endorses Z" is highly suspect logic, to put it mildly.
> it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product (if you don't believe that, you can stop reading now, because no argument will convince you)
I've upvoted your comment for the value of your perspective and information about your own history with replit predating CodeAcademy, and I appreciate that lots of us feel protective of our ideas and the capacity to benefit from the work we put into executing on them.
But... "no argument will convince you?" While it's sometimes true that people hold positions they didn't reason themselves into and can't be reasoned out of, I've found "no argument will convince you" is often indicative of the fact that the speaker considers their position a prima facie reality, which is another way of saying they didn't reason themselves into it either, and therefore may also be underappreciating the merits of a countercase. Or, perhaps as common, they've abandoned the merits altogether and are attempting to narrate themselves or an audience through a lowering of status of those who disagree.
There are real questions about what a knowledge worker has a right to take with them after they leave, and you'd probably find lots of people are amenable to the idea that an employer has some legitimate claims. If it's true that this project "copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws" then maybe that might even persuade people if those don't look like natural decisions for the domain, appear to involve some novel problem solving, and/or weren't made public.
But the person on the other side of the argument:
(a) clearly didn't think they were doing anything they needed to hide from you
(b) has already outlined why they thought all their technical decisions were either not unique or influenced by things you'd made public when you made it clear you felt badly treated
(c) sure seemed to be making shows of good faith vs being met with threats of using capital to fund an aggressive legal response.
Those might be the reasons why many here are taking a critical posture (vs, say, reflexively siding with an open source project).
You may find you don't care if you can persuade those who disagree you. Sometimes that's a wise course. You may even exercise the privilege to take this to litigation. But if you really feel your opposition is in the wrong here and want to make a winning case either socially or legally then you're probably going to have to engage some of those points on a more compelling basis.
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.
sorry, do you seriously expect a student who trained at your company to not program the way you do? what do you think they are there for?
Fascinating! What flaws that existed in the architecture of Replit that existed in 2019 and persist to this day are still considered to be trade secrets worth pursuing legal remedies to keep secret?
I understand that you may not be able to describe the invisible long-term proprietary flaws for a number of possible reasons, but can you ballpark the number of these critical flaws that are the unique IP of replit? Or at least the relevant number of times when the code in this recent open source software overlapped with years-old mistakes in the Replit code base that are so crucial that they must be protected?
I'd add that its not uncommon to see same flaws that you'd naturally add when working on similar kind of product
So just saying it has the same flaws as my product by no means implies anything. Very well may mean that the other person didn't notice it or de-prioritized it, just like you when you started the project (which is why the flaw exists in my product at first place).