50 ms·

Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

• gavinray 5y ago
  Why 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 baseless claims, let them do it. Litigation is expensive, you could have qualified for a public defender while they burned company assets, or just have represented yourself. I say this as someone who isn't a stranger to the courts and judicial system.
  • YorickPeterse 5y ago
    The premise of being sued should be enough to scare most people, whether they are right or wrong. As such it's not surprising.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
      The email didn't say suing. It just said he was going to talk to his lawyers. Just wait for a cease and desist. If someone can replicate you code and maintain it as an OSS project, there is absolutely no way that wouldn't be the lawyers first step. I'm not shaming him cause that's still scary, but this is a just another CEO thinking they can do what they want.
  • devwastaken 5y ago
    Defense is a lot more expensive than offense in civil court. Complicated cases like these can be dragged for years and they'd have to pay for it. Intellectual property laws are very in the favor of whomever has the money to throw lawyers around.
    • megous 5y ago
      Yes, but what would replit gain? Going after such a case would have given them nothing except for some expense. Dragging random people through court without any meaningful expected outcome sure doesn't seem like something VC's would like to fund. I'm not a VC though. Do they just rubber stamp whatever bullshit behavior from a CEO?
      • juancb 5y ago
        On the other hand what would such a move get Radon? Amjad seemed to sense that maybe he was fishing for a job. Which to me it seems like he was especially being a new grad. The approach backfired and now he airs the interaction which gets Radon publicity. We only have one side of the story so it's hard to tell what exactly is going on here.
        • jjeaff 5y ago
          Seems like Radon was just being friendly. The CEO had shared with Radon some progress and looks like he was just updating him on what he had been up to.
      • testudovictoria 5y ago
        This isn't about what Replit can gain. It's about stifling this before it can ever become something more that a legal threat. Replit is banking on legal pressure to win this for them, because there's likely a nasty PR fallout on the other side of actual litigation.
      • acdha 5y ago
        Once it becomes personal, don’t assume economic analysis will have any weight in the decision to continue suing. VCs give money but they’re not going to micromanage the company unless something becomes a major distraction. Given how much the VC model involves finding things to monetize, I would not expect strong pushback against a claim that they have IP to protect (that’s an asset which the VCs co-own & intend to monetize) and if they have a lawyer on retainer it might not even be much of an expense to pursue early on.
  • floren 5y ago
    Unless I was sure the EFF or similar organization was ready to take me on pro bono, I'd do a lot to avoid the Corporate Nuisance Lawsuit Cannon. A fun evening project isn't worth years in court and hundreds of thousands spent on legal fees--and Replit knows this. Hopefully by publicizing what happened, he might get an offer for legal defense if necessary, then reinstate the project.
  • whimsicalism 5y ago
    > Litigation is expensive, you could have qualified for a public defender while they burned company assets > I say this as someone who isn't a stranger to the courts and judicial system. This wouldn't be a criminal case, how are public defenders relevant? For not being a stranger, you seem sort of unfamiliar with the potential downsides of being involved in legal action, the existence of damages/remedies, etc.
  • jawns 5y ago
    > you could have qualified for a public defender In general, that's only for criminal matters. At least, that's what the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel pertains to. That said, sometimes public defenders are appointed in certain limited non-criminal proceedings, but a case about intellectual property is not one where you'd qualify for a public defender.
  • eCa 5y ago
    > Why did you take it down? And why did you apologize? I think taking it down (temporary at first) is prudent in that situation, but I agree about the apology. Don’t apologize unless you agree you have done something wrong.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Taylor_OD 5y ago
    >> 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.
  • stale2002 5y ago
    > Why did you take it down? And why did you apologize? Probably because he actually did do something that, if not explicitly wrong/illegal, then at the very least on the borderline of being so. And he has very little to gain by fighting this. He got his clicks and likes already. What would he need to website for?
• yellow_lead 5y ago
  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.
  • Ocha 5y ago
    100% agree. If this threatened them, it means they are not doing well.
    • threatofrain 5y ago
      Or it may simply reflect the personal style and values of the CEO Amjad Masad notwithstanding their company position.
      • heavyset_go 5y ago
        Or both.
  • le-mark 5y ago
    Clearly their investors should have funded the intern!
    • threatofrain 5y ago
      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.
  • whymauri 5y ago
    They offered to hire him before insinuating he was a bad/demanding intern, as well. This is standard manipulative behavior and has little benefit to anyone besides attempting to make the intern feel bad. This isn't the first time I've seen a founder resort to this exact type of behavior before threatening legal action.
• komuher 5y ago
  I used replit few times but now i'll remove my account there. srsly what a bullshit they try to do with taking down open source projects cause they feel threaten, pathetic.
• toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Are there any open source competitors to Replit that are seeking patrons? I have been encouraged by the rapid fire Show HNs of open source first startups [1], and this space seems ripe for such open tooling. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=false&query=show%20hn%20open%20source&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • charlesdaniels 5y ago
    Try It Online[0] seems to offer a very similar service - if you don't care about the collaboration aspect of it. It claims to be self-hostable[1]. glot.io[2] is another, which seems to fit more in the realm of "pastebin with runnable snippets". As I understand it, a big sell of repl.it is that they have some kind of collaborative editing support, which none of the alternatives I was able to find in a few minutes of digging have. Google Colab has this, but only support Python (AFAIK) and is not open source. 0 - https://tio.run/# https://tio.run/# 1 - https://github.com/TryItOnline/tiosetup https://github.com/TryItOnline/tiosetup 2 - https://glot.io/ https://glot.io/
    • toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Thank you!
  • ipodopt 5y ago
    https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/collaboration/live-share https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/develop-cloud/overview https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/develop-cloud/overview
  • neweggrma 5y ago
    Eclipse Theia: https://theia-ide.org/ https://theia-ide.org/ It's an open source project bringing the VS Code user interface to the browser. It supports a large number of VS Code extensions. It is by-far the stand-out in this arena, and yet seems to be sadly very unknown. VS Code Liveshare and friends are all proprietary junk, to be polite. GitPod.io is a directly usable end-user product. Theia is used by Google, ARM, Arduino, IBM, Huawei, Ericsson, Red Hat, and more. It's seriously good stuff.
• raunak 5y ago
  If I’m reading those emails correctly, Amjad the CEO directly emailed you occasionally. It is pretty stunning that as the CEO of the company, he would stoop to what I interpret as pretty unprofessional communication and petty threats. I also am failing to connect the dots about why Replit would even feel threatened - if you were as helpful of an intern as described, you’d think they would recognize that you had good intentions only when creating Riju - very odd behavior from Replit all around.
  • vidarh 5y ago
    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.
    • tedivm 5y ago
      This is a great point- there were a ton of ways that this could have been handled that would have left all parties happy and better off, but the CEO went directly for the lawyer power play.
      • ljm 5y ago
        The lawyer powerplay _and_ also disparaging the OP by calling them a difficult intern. I could give the legal peacocking a pass. It's a weird flex, a bit too much ego really, but sure, I don't care if your daddy is cooler than my daddy. Punching down at your intern though, as a CEO? Jeez, talk about poor leadership. I would not work for that man.
    • imglorp 5y ago
      Yep it's a very small step from suing a friendly collaborator to suing a customer. Ask Oracle.
    • zamalek 5y ago
      > 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.
• orliesaurus 5y ago
  That's really shitty. I wonder what the founders of Replit have to say about this? They're active on HN so I hope they can address this publicly... EDIT: I mean the screenshots are irrefutable evidence of how bad this has escalated - it started as a normal convo and went downwards like the CEO was out to get some blood for no reason ... now I guess you're gonna get a lawyer threat letter to take down the whole blogpost because you've revealed private conversations without both parties' consent?
  • FiloSottile 5y ago
    > now I guess you're gonna get a lawyer threat letter to take down the whole blogpost because you've revealed private conversations without both parties' consent? Absent any NDA or other contract, there is nothing requiring the other party’s consent to publish correspondence in the US.
    • jll29 5y ago
      +1 Finally someone raising the valid point about "it all depends on the legal paperwork signed."
      • shkkmo 5y ago
        How would an NDA cover corrospondence with an intern from 2 years ago?
        • ivanstame 5y ago
          It wouldn't
    • orliesaurus 5y ago
      What about option 3) here [1] - this email was initiated by Replit's CEO - so publishing the original email is...bad? [1] https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/is-it-legal-to-publish-email-that-someone-sent-to-me https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/3980/is-it-legal-to-...
• dimgl 5y ago
  Yeah, not sure about this one chief. I don't know the legal aspects here, but I think it makes sense to not create an open-source project that competes with your previous employer and then correspond with them letting them know you did it...
  • sitzkrieg 5y ago
    this is not reddit
    • dimgl 5y ago
      I'm not sure I follow. How is this a Reddit comment? I don't think the author of this post is in the right here. Most people are piling on saying Repl.it is behaving irrationally. But to me it seems... in line with what an employer should think?
    • zemo 5y ago
      are you suggesting that publishing evidence against you is a bad idea on reddit but not a bad idea here? Or is your gripe that he said "chief"? That seems like focusing on the wrong thing entirely.
  • saagarjha 5y ago
    Once you leave? Don't really think they can do much as long as you aren't using trade secrets.
  • whimsicalism 5y ago
    Is this not what the CEO of repl.it did, moving from codeacademy to repl.it?
    • dimgl 5y ago
      I don't know about what the CEO of repl.it did. It shouldn't matter. I only know what the author has chosen to publish on his blog post. He corresponded with his previous employer regarding a free project that competes with them. When he got a negative response he then decided to air his dirty laundry on the Internet.
• stuff4ben 5y ago
  Kind of a shitty thing to do by that company. So much for embracing open source. And probably they don't have a real business case to begin with if they're threatened by a former intern's open source project. Likely scared they'll lose their funding once the investors see how weak they are.
• reitanuki 5y ago
  Historically, you didn't need an account to use Repl.it. It used to be one of the best sites to go to for this kind of thing. After they added the account requirement and seeing this blog post, I think I'll have to change my opinion about them.
  • fourseventy 5y ago
    Agreed. I used to use Repli.it all the time if i just wanted to test some Ruby code real quick. Now when I go to the site its asking me to make an account and set up a project and all kinds of nonsense that I don't care about
• etherio 5y ago
  Wow... This is really disappointing on Replit's part, especially considering the company's emphasis on an ideal of developer empowerment / creativity / collaboration, this seems very excessive. I hope there's more to this story than it seems, because Replit has been doing lots of good work and this would lower my faith in them...
• kazinator 5y ago
  I don't think there is any fundamentally original idea in replit. It is a time-sharing system where you can log in and use a programming language. We have had those since not long after the dawn of computing. Since at least 1970, we also had smart terminals that allowed the user to fill in a form, and validate it, before sending it to the host. So the time-sharing session being carried out by a protocol between the web front end and back-end is not ipso facto original. Needless to say, neither is the idea of a repl running in a separate process that provides editing, with expressions sent out to a running image for evaluation.
  • imiric 5y ago
    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 millions in funding, so can a web timesharing system. ;) [1]: https://mightyapp.com/ https://mightyapp.com/
    • slow_donkey 5y ago
      I agree with you but nothing about the comment was discussing whether or not people will pay for repl.it The context of this HN post is about originality itself.
      • imiric 5y ago
        True, but criticizing a lack of originality boils down to "this product isn't useful". I was arguing more for the utility/value of the service, which results in demand and customers.
        • gtyras2mrs 5y ago
          > criticizing a lack of originality boils down to "this product isn't useful" in general yes, but in this case the criticism is warranted when Replit is claiming that that the open-source toy project somehow stole their idea
• npv789 5y ago
  what a shame replit!!
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• zemo 5y ago
  so they said "we're gonna talk to some lawyers" and your response is to write a lengthy public blog post without any legal counsel, in which you publish private correspondence along with the other person's contact info without their consent, and in which you essentially document all of the evidence against you -and- admit you understood your actions? huh. That's probably not how I would have responded.
  • anm89 5y ago
    Yes, poor repl.it who's explicitly threatening to use their big bankroll to squash a small developer doing something he is passionate about it. He should just shut up and accept the validity of their effort to silence him.
    • zemo 5y ago
      it feels like you're intentionally missing the point here. If repl.it is acting as if they believe they have legal leverage, why respond by giving them more leverage?
      • anm89 5y ago
        Ah now I understand. He should just go get his own highly paid lawyers and dig down for a lengthy legal battle. His own VC guys will foot the bill! Or he could get on the top spot of HN for free and get a massive amount of community support, potentially people who actually will foot his legal bill, for the price of a few hours of writing a blog post.
        • stale2002 5y ago
          > He should just go get his own highly paid lawyers and dig down for a lengthy legal battle. Have you considered that what the person did in this situation was actually illegal? Yes, when you do illegal things, it is difficult to defend them in court. But that doesn't make him in the right. It doesn't even look like he was going to be sued, since he took down the website, and apologized. It was the kid who went public with all of this, in order to get the clicks and likes.
• danuker 5y ago
  They 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 precedent: https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance
  • sdevonoes 5y ago
    > 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).
• anm89 5y ago
  Sad that this is my expectation these days. In the past I'd say I'd no longer use repl.it but if I ruled out interacting with every company that did unethical stuff I had have to lock myself in an empty room. But still I'll make an effort to stop using repl.it going forward. What a scumbag move.
• selykg 5y ago
  And with that I won't be renewing my Replit subscription.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  I could understand an over eager lawyer but this is the CEO of a company with $20 million in funding personally threatening to sic the lawyers on a one man open source project. This is evidence that: 1) he doesn’t have anything better to do, bad news for Replit, 2) he’s afraid of this little project, also bad news for Replit.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • chapium 5y ago
    The CEO's ego was rejected and now he's dumping on this guy. Seems like a classic NPD response.
  • duxup 5y ago
    That was my first thought. How 'empty' is Replit as a company if some rando intern is a threat ... and/or how poor is the CEO at deciding how to spend his time if this is how they choose to do it?
  • uncomputation 5y ago
    I’m also gonna add that, if I invested in a company and the CEO used any fraction of that funding to crush a non-competitor with legal might, I would seriously regret my investment. It seems to me this guy doesn’t understand his own value prop more than a former intern.
    • spoonjim 5y ago
      Yep. At $20m raised, the CEO should be building product, closing customers, building positive press for the company (oops), and recruiting. Time spent on anything else is highly suspect.
  • sg47 5y ago
    Cue article from PG on how founders have to watch out for upstarts by giving them a lashing and issuing legal threats.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• klohto 5y ago
  Pretty serious accusation with petty comments from the CEO. Feel like we are missing some crucial part of the story though. Doesn’t make sense why would they go out of their way to threaten a small open-source project.
  • clevergadget 5y ago
    I am so jealous of your lived experience
  • marcinzm 5y ago
    From what I can tell, the CEO has a sore spot for copycats to the point of irrationality. Why I don’t know but he really really hates them in a deep way.
• procgen 5y ago
  Atrocious. I've never used replit, and now I never will.
• sdevonoes 5y ago
  Wow. I was about to apply for an open position at Replit. Not anymore.
• stuaxo 5y ago
  Maybe I was just naïve but when I first started reading HN there was a lot of optimism around startups, maybe it's just the scales falling from our eyes, but it just seems to be one shitty deed after another - maybe the ecosystem was always poisonous ?
  • haram_masala 5y ago
    I’d say startup culture has changed quite a bit over the past 25 years. It was always highly competitive, of course, but it has IMO lost some of the honor and unspoken rules that it had. Employees are much more likely to be screwed out of any windfall when a liquidity event or IPO occurs, for example, and in fact even junior investors get pushed around too. I honestly don’t know what has caused this change.
  • mattip 5y ago
    There are thousands of startups. Are you generalising some bad actors to characterise an entire segment?
  • pianoben 5y ago
    I feel like there's been a dramatic shift in sentiment since I started reading HN in 2010/2011 or so. Having lived and worked through the last startup boom, it's easy to see why. Startups as a force in our economy and our culture were (once again) new and interesting and untested and exciting. You could make an app and be an "instant" millionaire! Money was flowing freely - the Bay Area office-warming parties from newly-minted Series A startups were a sight to behold. Of course we (I) saw it all with rose-colored glasses; reality is always more complicated. Years have passed, and the plucky upstarts have become capitalist overlords. Many vested interests have worked hard over time to establish an alternate narrative where tech is ominous, unaccountable, and used for political ill. People are people and do shitty things, even at startups. It's all just people and always has been, but for a time it really did feel special. Maybe I'm just old.
• user3939382 5y ago
  Wow, I'll go ahead and move them from the list of companies I was excited to see succeed to companies I will avoid forever.
• swang 5y ago
  Assuming this is what happened.. why would you even worry about your intern doing a project. I don't know how long repl.it has existed (from my memory, a while) but are they that scared of something like this catching up to them and beating them in the marketplace? A product the author seemed to have no intention of releasing for commercial use anyways? Also isn't the entire point of an internship to learn from a company they're working for? Are they worried about their own current internal employees quitting and starting a competing repl.it clone? A bit shitty, IMO. Wonder if it's worth the hit in reputation.
  • TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
    I interpreted the CEO's reactions less as scared and more as angry. The guy interned at their company, refused a bunch of offers, then released an open source project that at first glance mimics their own company. It seemed more like an emotional reflex by the CEO than a calculating ploy to suppress competition. Still doesn't bode well though.
    • CRConrad 5y ago
      Where did you get the "refused a bunch of offers" bit from; did I miss that, or...?
• debacle 5y ago
  The only question that matters is "Did you sign something saying you agreed not to name something like this when you interned for Repl.it, and is it enforceable in your jurisdiction?" I think this makes Amjad look a bit like an ass, but I don't know him personally or your relationship with him or repl.it
  • strbean 5y ago
    Seems like both Radon and Repl.it are based in California. If that is correct, then non-compete agreements are only enforceable for founders/partners in a business.
    • dllthomas 5y ago
      Not that it presumably applies here, but IIUC they're also enforceable if you're basically paying the former employee (most of?) their salary for the duration of the agreement.
• zx2391 5y ago
  No offense, but I found the early replit so cool, I will replicate it as a weekend project soon.
  • ezekg 5y ago
    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-party package support (yarn, pip, nuget, maven, etc.)
    • ezekg 5y ago
      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.)
• rwmj 5y ago
  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?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • cmsj 5y ago
    I guess the cynical answer would be: because there is so much VC money out there, you can probably get funding for just about anything. I'm off to work on a pitch deck for coding bootcamps for cats.
  • abarrettwilsdon 5y ago
    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 https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1394002500508807168
    • rwmj 5y ago
      > 6m users Is the plan to lose money on each user until they reach profitability? How do they plan to make money?
• 015a 5y ago
  Since Amjad has so much to say about ethics, quick pulse-check, lets rank these in terms of their ethical foundations: building a love-letter open-source hobbyist alternative to a large application; shutting down this alternative with potentially unfounded legal threats; making millions of dollars standing on the shoulders of giants by effectively repackaging and selling hosted open source software.
• hprotagonist 5y ago
  extremely unrelated to repl.it: thank you for straight.el !
  • celeritascelery 5y ago
    I am a huge fan of all of Radon’s work!
  • tome 5y ago
    Yes, this is the only sane way I found of managing packages on Emacs. Talented guy!
• anm89 5y ago
  Double speaky "pity us, we're just the VC funded, expensive lawyer having, little guy" response post from the founder incoming.
• yumraj 5y ago
  This is a good case study in how to not treat someone, especially a seemingly talented engineer. CEO’s hinting of money raised and legal threat is almost comical. The CEO should have recognized that this is a guy who is interested in this space and should have made every effort to hire/acquihire him. He may have had to use some of that VC money he was going to pay the lawyers but that would have been the best. If I were a VC in this company I would be very concerned by the immaturity of the CEO. EDIT: one more point: Would ReplIt be now the Copycat if they add the support for languages that the OP had added but were missing from Replit?
• stevebmark 5y ago
  Did the author disclose the work on Riju as a prior invention before joining Repl.it? If so that puts him in the clear. I would also check your hiring contract to see what kind of clauses are in there about prior inventions. For larger companies, I don't think this company behavior would surprise anyone. I think I can understand where Repl.it is coming from. All I know is this behavior (by Riju author) isn't something I would personally want to do. Join a company, leave, and open source something that is directly related to the company's business model, whether it undermines their profits or not. It's standard for companies (other than Apple) to say "work on whatever tech you want, but if it competes with us, we should evaluate it that's OK." I would at least have gotten their buy-in on the project or idea first. Especially given this commit message: > repl.it superiority!! I also wouldn't use intentions or the fact that it currently has less traffic than Repl.it as example of why this is harmless. I would approach this with an empathetic view to how a company would see an engineer leaving and then open sourcing something directly related to the company, based on what they learned while working at the company.
  • abricot 5y ago
    Did you not get the part about him being an intern. Everything you write would apply for someone on vp level with opportunities and stock option. Get down from there.
    • CapmCrackaWaka 5y ago
      What do stock options have to do with anything? The engineers (interns or not) working on the code base are more capable of copying the product that a VP who can't write software. A VP would be capable of stealing employees, connections, or clients from the company, which (at least compared to this case) would be much more damaging, sure, but that's just a strawman you created to detract from OP's argument, which is that the ethics of trying to open source a similar project to your old employers product is morally ambiguous at best.
      • daniel-thompson 5y ago
        > the ethics of trying to open source a similar project to your old employers product is morally ambiguous at best I don't think it's bad at all, considering replit is itself built on open-source software, and the CEO is a loud champion of open-source software, and the intern's project only explores one relatively small aspect (number of languages supported) of the problem space while purposefully ignoring all the other stuff necessary to build a competing product
• TX0098812 5y ago
  Seems odd but keep in mind we've only heard one side and the truth always sounds obvious when only one side is heard.
  • asimjalis 5y ago
    I wish more people on the internet felt this way.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jfrunyon 5y ago
  Because why not allow users to run completely unsandboxed code on your own servers with no limitations? What could go wrong? https://github.com/raxod502/python-in-a-box/blob/master/server.js https://github.com/raxod502/python-in-a-box/blob/master/serv...
• sdevonoes 5y ago
  One thing I don't understand is: how is that a CEO cannot anticipate the consequences of acting like a bully via email? The blog post will make a huge negative impact on the reputation of Replit... really, CEOs these days don't think before writing?
  • ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
    I think one can, but maybe experience has (wrongfully) taught some of those folks that it can actually be a positive experience. If it weren't for the INCREDIBLY detailed, well-reasoned, documented blog post, and its ability to reach the front page, the tactics of the CEO would have actually succeeded. He did, indeed, take the project down, and took the threat seriously. What the CEO didn't anticipate was the intern's ability to get so much exposure on this. I can see this tactic working 95% of the time, which is prob. why when it doesn't it REALLY doesn't.
• cjv 5y ago
  https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401617251464138754 https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401617251464138754 Unbelievable and shameless.
  • ezekg 5y ago
    The fact that Amjad did this exact thing to Codecademy [0] makes it even more baffling. [0]: https://twitter.com/will_ye_/status/1402016586953678848 https://twitter.com/will_ye_/status/1402016586953678848
• mpeg 5y ago
  Poor form by the repl.it CEO here, bullying a junior employee to take their weekend project down. If your product is threatened by this, it's probably not a very good product. I've used Repl.it multiplayer to interview candidates in the past, will probably look for an alternative in the future. If anyone knows of one that supports non-web languages (I already use codesandbox for frontend) like python, etc. this is the chance to pitch it.
  • no_time 5y ago
    > If anyone knows of one that supports non-web languages (I already use codesandbox for frontend) like python, etc. this is the chance to pitch it. How about a locally hosted lxc container running nothing but sshd, tmux (to share a single tty), nano and whatever compiler/interpreter you need? If you want to get real fancy and edit the same file, kakoune has a collaborative editing feature. I might not value my time enough but right now I really don't get the value proposition of 70% of saas businesses trending here.
  • zaczekadam 5y ago
    I just emailed you!
• stuaxo 5y ago
  The threats seem directly at odds with the CEOs tweet here https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401617251464138754 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 have just been happy with that. It takes more than just being able to run all the languages in sandboxes to compete - if you tried this, people would be mining bitcoin and hosting all sorts of awful stuff. Really strange / insecure attitude.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    Plenty of people are pleasant in public and shitty in private.
  • randompwd 5y ago
    My guess would be more the available source rather than the website itself. I think it's fair to say somebody who interned at a place would have had things explained to them and had access to internal design docs which the intern themselves wouldnt necessarily have figured out if working from scratch. I find it very bizarre for an intern to do this.
    • iforgotpassword 5y ago
      Replit is about everything surrounding the eval() call. The intern's clone, according to them, had nothing of this (scaling, user accounts, saving code snippets, ...). If they'd rebuilt all that too I'd see the point, but really, what great secrets are there in those "design docs" that just refer to the part of the service where you put in your code and click run? These things have been around for at least a decade, this one just seems to have the most languages.
    • Dah00n 5y ago
• sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Guys, I don’t know what this is about yet, but I know amjad (ceo). And I know that whatever is going on here, his intentions were pure. He’s proven himself to me that he’s pretty much the opposite of a sleezy corporate ceo who crushes intern side projects while twirling his mustache. I just wanted to encourage everybody to chill on it for a moment and wait to see what’s up, because my spidey senses are screaming “miscommunication / crossed wires” rather than malicious intent, for what it’s worth. EDIT: Fuck. https://i.imgur.com/cFYq7Nv.png https://i.imgur.com/cFYq7Nv.png I'm going offline for awhile to focus on family matters. Evidently, I am not a good judge of character, and I need to stop believing in people without really knowing them.
  • efxz 5y ago
    Take a minute and read before posting, because you are really wrong here buddy...
  • tgv 5y ago
    It doesn't scream miscommunication to me. It's of course possible to save face claiming that, but they're talking about the very same thing, IMO.
  • juped 5y ago
    Are you aware of how statements like these look to those on the outside of whatever particular good old boys club it is you're referencing here?
  • verall 5y ago
    Hey, you might want to chat with him if you know him, since it seems like he has a personal issue with "copycats". I don't think he was twirling a moustache, but it seems like the idea of being cloned is very personal to Amjad, and he gets emotional about it. You see this both in this exchange and in previous tweets about "copycats".
  • Mizza 5y ago
    When will society learn the lesson that people's goodness and "pureness" is based on the actions they take, and not on the opinions they hold or the manner they hold in private company.
• anderspitman 5y ago
  This kind of feels like a bizarre inverse of the "I could build a better Facebook in a weekend if I wanted to." A company feeling threatened enough to risk a PR nightmare on a one man open source project, when they know better than anyone that their real value is in scale, account features, UX, etc.
• ogsalmanxx 5y ago
  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.
• stopachka 5y ago
  This 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.
  • dimgl 5y ago
    I made a similar comment below. I'm surprised at the anger towards repl.it on this thread.
    • devenvdev 5y ago
      The anger is not directed at replit but at its CEO. The company's negative reaction is understandable, lawyering up in response to some freshly graduated intern that obviously had not intended any harm - not cool. They could talk much softer and the result would be the same. That CEO dude gives an asshole vibe - people react :shrug: edit: CTO -> CEO
  • daniel-thompson 5y ago
    > creating a copy of what you worked on as an intern According to him, he didn't: > "I worked for Replit in Summer 2019, where I was asked to rebuild Replit's package management stack and make it open-source."
• nicebill8 5y ago
  I 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.
• dodgepitchforks 5y ago
  Publishing 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.
  • fastball 5y ago
    * previously worked for as an intern
• raverbashing 5y ago
  I can't defend Replit here, but I think the situation could have been handled better from both sides. If you have just interned at a company, don't immediately go working on a similar thing and just saying "hey here it is". It will at best sound like sour grapes or looking like a "show off". At best. I understand, lack of experience and an eagerness to build leads to those situations. The answer from Replit was unnecessary.
• KingOfCoders 5y ago
  Vote me down, but Ycombinator: "It's all about the founders blah blah blah" - if their process finds and funds these kind of people, the process is broken. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/repl-it https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/repl-it
  • bravura 5y ago
    Yes, but supporting remote by offering $0 - 0 salary and 0.00% - 0.00% equity seems legit and completely transparent: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/repl-it/jobs/aihA75TQr-platform-engineer-infrastructure https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/repl-it/jobs/aihA75TQr...
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • ilikehurdles 5y ago
      This seems like an illegal job listing in Colorado.
      • drusepth 5y ago
        I've seen a lot of companies "get around" this new law by just saying the job is not available to people living in Colorado, either explicitly on the listing or when you apply.
      • samatman 5y ago
        A cursory glance[0] suggests this only applies if a company has at least one employee in Colorado. [0]: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/colorado-pay-transparency-more-guidance-job-promotional-posting-requirements-issued https://www.natlawreview.com/article/colorado-pay-transparen... To follow a tangent for a second, this doesn't seem wise on Colorado's part. It doesn't strike me as great law to begin with, but I'm willing to concede that point: the problem is that it creates a considerable regulatory burden for an all-remote company which takes on a single Colorado employee. As someone who works remotely since well before the pandemic, I'd be pretty upset about this if I were a Colorado resident. I have family in Colorado as well, and while I've never seriously considered moving there this law makes it even less likely.
• Taylor_OD 5y ago
  Wild. A better CEO would have made you an acquhire offer to work at Replit. I would be shocked if you don't get blow back/more threats from the CEO for posting these emails.
  • p0nce 5y ago
    They were already offering him a job.
    • samatman 5y ago
      And they might have gotten him back on the team if they hadn't spectacularly blown it.
• thecupisblue 5y ago
  Haven't used replit, our product is still in stealth and we're looking for funding, but tbh I'd love to have you work (part-time remote or whatever) for us. Im quite discombobulated on why they are doing this instead of offering you a job. I say good job Radon and if you ever want a job doing open things for fun where a company wont't sue you afterwards, ping. This behaviourk... it is not just unethical from their side, it's also showing their lack of belief in their company or vision. If I was an investor, this would be a bad signal boost for them. And if I was you, I'd open the project again, work on it even more and tell them - sue me. This case would never stand, it's like a McDonalds employee making a burger at home and McD suing them. I just wonder, who the fuck does Amjad think he is? You aren't even innovating, this amount of ego-driven bullshit is a tell-tale sign that they wont do anything note-worthy except remain a glorified wrapper-as-a-SaaS. Reading this, I'm pretty sure I'll never use their product again.
  • Smaug123 5y ago
    > Im quite discombobulated on why they are doing this instead of offering you a job. In fairness, they are doing this as well as offering him a job (see the second email screenshot in the article).
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• aboringusername 5y ago
  So this is when we purchase "fuckreplit.com", offer a far superior clone and watch as the free market does its magic? Every time I read a story like this I just hope the business dies, and for any employees it's time to jump ship, you really do not want to be working for a CEO who makes comments and threats. Time to release that source code, have 100 clones appear and let this loser sue everyone into misery - I'm sure his investors won't be best pleased. For now let's spread this story (make a backup! He'll want this taken down as it's terrible PR!). Hope replit rots.
  • boboche 5y ago
    I think RIPlit would have better potential at attracting customers than anything using the f-word :)
    • odyslam 5y ago
      REKT.it is also nice
  • ORioN63 5y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20201004004511/https://github.com/raxod502/riju https://web.archive.org/web/20201004004511/https://github.co...
  • wearywanderer 5y ago
    May I suggest replsh.it ?
• Grustaf 5y ago
  It would be helpful if you could post the designs side by side so we could all judge if you have copied the design. If you haven't, they are simply in the wrong and you should re-publish you site. If your design is a copy, then most of your arguments are not very relevant. > Every similarity between my project and Replit can be explained by looking only at GitHub repositories and blog posts that were published online by Replit itself, making them obviously not any kind of secret. I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to copy their design even if it is public. Most of the bullets under "In my opinion, the answer to this question is no, for a number of reasons" also seem beside the point. It's not allowed, or ethical, to copy an existing service just because yours is free, or "not intended to compete".
  • autarch 5y ago
    > I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to copy their design even if it is public. That's not true. This depends entirely on the license of the relevant (repl.it) GitHub projects that the author is referencing. I don't know of any open source license that allows you to copy & modify code but somehow forbids you from reusing intangible design elements. This case is a little confusing, since it sounds like a case of simply producing a similar result _without_ copying any code from the repl.it repo. But given that you can copy the code to get the same result (again, assuming a FOSS license), I don't see how the license could forbid someone from using the same design _without_ copying code. But IANAL.
    • greenshackle2 5y ago
      > again, assuming a FOSS license replit is not open source though. Only some parts of it are. You can infringe copyright without copy-pasting code. If I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, burn my only copy of the book, then write and publish Jerry Schmotter and the Alchemist's Gem, a novel about a teenage boy with a star-shaped scar, etc., I'm probably infringing copyright even if I didn't word-for-word copy any part of a Harry Potter book. There's a reason why "clean room" design exists; to maximally protect yourself against claims of infringement, you want the implementers of your copycat product to not even have seen the original implementation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design Copy-pasted code is a smoking gun but it's not necessary. (I really have no idea if replit would have a case though. Seems dubious. But generally Copyright law is murkier than what some programmers think.)
• robertkrahn01 5y ago
  I've worked for ten years on the Lively Kernel project [1,2,3], originally created by Dan Ingalls at Sun Microsystems. Running JavaScript, Smalltalk, R, Clojure, Haskell, Python, C++ and a few other languages in it. When I first saw replit, I thought, wow someone copied 1/4 of Lively. Do they really think they had an original idea? [1] https://lively-kernel.org https://lively-kernel.org [2] https://lively-next.org https://lively-next.org [3] https://cloxp.github.io/cloxp-intro.html https://cloxp.github.io/cloxp-intro.html
  • seg_lol 5y ago
    There still exists a fork of the Riju project on github which I have cloned locally. I would be more interested in running all of these languages in wasm and the execution state can be live migrated between the server and the client, that would be something that could surpass other online repls. https://qvault.io/python/running-python-in-the-browser-with-web-assembly/ https://qvault.io/python/running-python-in-the-browser-with-... Repl.it has no standing to code written by Radon.
    • robertkrahn01 5y ago
      Yeah wasm is definitely getting interesting as a platform for these. As long as you can build/compile a language VM (such as the Python VM) or a language compiler itself in wasm there shouldn't be much stopping you. Thinks like that have been done even with plain JS and the results are very cool, see e.g. SqueakJS, a Squeak/Smalltalk VM implemented directly in JS. [1] https://squeak.js.org/ https://squeak.js.org/
    • diogenesjunior 5y ago
      >There still exists a fork of the Riju project on github Link? Edit: NVM, found it: https://github.com/umesh-timalsina/riju https://github.com/umesh-timalsina/riju
  • merb 5y ago
    well there are tons of online repl's or online ide's that came way before replit. cloud9/eclipse che and than there is this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_source_code_playgrounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_source_co... and this: https://joel.franusic.com/online-reps-and-repls https://joel.franusic.com/online-reps-and-repls
• codingdave 5y ago
  > 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 not push a losing agenda. Yet they also must do what their client asks, so lawyers looking into a concern, or even sending nastygrams... those are meaningless actions. It only becomes meaningful if and when if their lawyers indicate they believe they really have a case, or if your own lawyer believes they have a case. Everything before that is posturing and bullying. If I were in the same situation as OP, I'd state that my intent was positive, ask to be informed of the results of discussions with attorneys, and wish them to have a nice day. Admit no wrong, make no apologies, ignore irrelevant statements (in particular personal attacks), and just let it slide until they take a real action of some kind. Once they do take an action, then it might be appropriate to do what they want. But seriously... stop letting people be bullies.
  • jonny_eh 5y ago
    > Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing agenda They will if they get paid.
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      Even if they get paid in advance, lawyers are acutely aware of the costs of litigation (even when you ultimately win) and that losing cases is one of the most common triggers for lawyers being sued, so, they really don't like losing cases even if they are getting paid. (There are caveats and exceptions, sure, but as a broad rule...)
      • jfrunyon 5y ago
        The problem is that it's impossible to know if the lawyer coming after you is one of the ethical ones or not.
      • 5y ago
• johnwheeler 5y ago
  Situation sounds like to me is: CEO keeps in touch with beast mode 10x'er intern who both impressed him and needed to be kept at arms length. Beast mode intern flirts with the idea of launching a competing startup under the guise of innocent open source project and transparency with a passing mention of project in email. CEO realizes he needs to shut intern down otherwise any communication that looks supportive might be used against him later on. Intern realizes the jig is up. Writes apology to CEO out of fear and discomfort. CEO responds that he doesn't want anything further to do with him. Beast mode intern exercises final option to write a blog post attempting to gain community support. Something or other like that...
  • jamestimmins 5y ago
    Except nothing in the OP's work or correspondence suggests any competitive aspirations, so unless other information comes to light, this summary is a fantasy.
    • whymauri 5y ago
      Regardless of whether it's true, one has to admit it sounds like a sideplot from Halt and Catch Fire, lol.
    • johnwheeler 5y ago
      Of course it doesn't.
      • kbelder 5y ago
        The lack of evidence is a clear indication!
  • wernercd 5y ago
    > Beast mode intern flirts with the idea of launching a competing startup under the guise of innocent open source project and transparency with mention in email. Amjad... is that you?
  • mitchill 5y ago
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  The messages by the CEO are somewhat unprofessional and very untactful. However, I think that they're well within their right to demand this be taken down. Perhaps, since you explicitly brought it to the attention of the CEO directly, they must demand that you take it down, or risk losing the ability to litigate against other more egregious examples of copycats by ex employees. But I'm no lawyer.
• karmicthreat 5y ago
  The Replit CEO seems like a pretty fragile person. They could have turned this into an advantage.
• yepthatsreality 5y ago
  Putting your foot down and being comfortable delivering aggression and threats does not make you a good CEO or even leader. I often see CEO’s demand unwavering respect and loyalty when they do little to return it and are highly unreasonable. Some people expect this image and demands from a CEO, but often I think it just leads to poor leadership. Steve Jobs is often quoted as being an effective asshole. That doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been better and more cordial. You can often get the reactions, loyalty, and respect you want from other methods. Very juvenile, is my take.
• gopiandcode 5y ago
  Just another reason not to trust companies that focus too much on "open source" rather than free/libre software. The former is just a corporate coopting of the latter in order to exploit developers and the developer community, as evidenced by the wildly regressive views of the repl.it CEO. Insane.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Yoofie 5y ago
  Beside the whole legal threat drama, is anyone else surprised that replit got $20 million in VC funding for what essentially is a script that can be made by an intern in a day? And the idea has been around forever and is not even unique. Is it really that easy to get VC funding for these types of things? Like Jesus, if all it takes is some ideas and moving to SF to secure funding like this, then I have a whole bunch of ideas worth 100's of millions that I would love to sell.
  • detaro 5y ago
    It's not something you do in "essentially a day" if you want it be secure and reliable. (E.g. the example toy project they link literally just runs python directly on the server: https://github.com/raxod502/python-in-a-box/blob/master/server.js#L13 https://github.com/raxod502/python-in-a-box/blob/master/serv... - you'll need to stop doing that very quickly if public). The parts of their stack that repl.it has put on their own Github looks loads more valuable (and I assume are also not covering some of those core problems) Which makes the reaction weird.
    • forgotpwd16 5y ago
      >Which makes the reaction weird. Consider that funders and investors like the parent reply will say "huh, that's so easy it isn't worth that much money" and it won't be that weird.
      • detaro 5y ago
        With a view that shallow, tons of well-funded tech companies are "easy", and get funding and success nevertheless.
        • forgotpwd16 5y ago
          Do those companies had a former employee who a year after having worked for them builds an extremely barebones clone in a day and calls it superior (even as a joke) to their product? I bet not.
• axbytg 5y ago
  Amjad is incredibly unprofessional. Years ago I worked in ed-tech and one of our sales reps replied to a tweet, from a Replit user complaining about some feature on Replit. Amjad damn near bit his head off and said some really nasty things to him. My coworker was this meek religious dude honestly trying to just send a teacher a helpful link. I personally would never work there and have steered several great engineers I know away. Edit: Amjad has been tweeting a ton of stuff along the lines of "oh you can be too popular on HN, hivemind bad" so expect to see him pull up the blinders and act like the world is crazy if he ever sees this. Amjad, you treat people poorly.
  • randompwd 5y ago
    > religious dude What has religious got to do with anything? Most terrorism in todays world is by religious dudes.
    • axbytg 5y ago
      I'm sure you can understand the context and I'm sure that the point you are insistent on inserting is not novel information to any readers of this thread.
  • gorbachev 5y ago
    "Amjad has been tweeting a ton of stuff along the lines of "oh you can be too popular on HN, hivemind bad"" Oh, so one of those "I'm a contrarian, therefore I'm awesome" type of people?
• koreanguy 5y ago
  CEO is absolutely nuts , upload it back to github and F** Replit in the balls
• ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
  As a meta comment, I will say that given how vocal PG is about repl.it and his support of them, the fact that this is the top post on HN and it has STAYED there I speaks very highly of dang, YC, and the community.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• mac-chaffee 5y ago
  All these battles over IP where there's an enormous power imbalance strike me as problems of ego. In college, I made a website and I thought another student "stole" the idea. I considered my legal options, but I'm glad I stopped there, even if I did have a case. The other student was never a serious threat to my idea and in fact lost interest in the idea next year. So the only harm I suffered was to my ego that thought I deserved power over others just because I had an idea slightly before someone else. I buy into Radon's argument that Replit has substantial value outside of "eval()" and is not actually threatened financially. As a result, I could understand a founder feeling disappointed at discovering clones, but I think it's important to separate harm to ego from harm to livelihood.
  • daenz 5y ago
    >All these battles over IP where there's an enormous power imbalance strike me as problems of ego. Bingo, especially the whole "we now have the resources to crush you" attitude. Someone please make sure these jokers never get money and power again.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • atoav 5y ago
    I sure too understand where his feelings come from, but the questions are not our first implusive feelings but how we act on them and what we get in the end. In your example you probably did the right thing by not persuing. But you could have also persued and fought a needless battle. Or it could have gone the other way: You could have overcome yourself and even teamed up with that other person. Finding people doing similar things can be very shocking, because it threatens your self image. But it is also a chance to learn and grow, because who other than the person doing similar things as you did is someone to learn from?
• jpxw 5y ago
  > despite being the most demanding intern we’ve ever had This is unprofessional and downright nasty and vindictive to a degree that I find almost unbelievable. God that little comment has really made my blood boil. I’m going to be avoiding repl.it from now onwards.
  • clevergadget 5y ago
    what a bully. he really punched down. some Weinstein style "You'll never work in this town again!" energy.
  • mcintyre1994 5y ago
    It made me laugh because he was trying to hire him earlier in the conversation. Pretty pathetic to turn like that.
• normac2 5y ago
  I'm on a job search, and Replit is one of the places I was going to apply, off of their listings on HN Who is Hiring?. So much for that, and I suspect a lot of devs are going to feel the same. (I don't think I'm good enough to get in, but there're a lot of really good devs who read HN who are.) In a seller's market for developers, this could hurt them in the form of less good talent applying. That said, my gut feeling as an outsider is that they feel genuinely burnt by a former employee making something similar to their product. Not just cynically trying to smash the competition. Not that that justifies anything—everyone thinks they're the good guy (well, almost everyone).
  • whimsicalism 5y ago
    which is hilarious given that the CEO of repl.it is literally building something similar to a product that he worked on at codeacademy
    • heavyset_go 5y ago
      The irony here is delicious.
    • tyingq 5y ago
      This is the absolute best part of this. Re-read his snarky language now knowing this and it's just...funny.
      • mmastrac 5y ago
        It's very easy to justify doing something to benefit yourself while writing it off as justified, and getting massively offended when someone does the same thing to your perceived detriment.
    • ignoramous 5y ago
      Replit's to be a new-age cloud company (ala fly.io) rather than Lynda.com for code. At least, thats what I gather from its founder's posts on Twitter.
  • 5y ago
• bastardoperator 5y ago
  I'm surprised anyone would invest in this technology when Microsoft has made it pretty clear they're going to dominate this space with https://github.com/features/codespaces https://github.com/features/codespaces
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  This guy seems to think he is entitled to nobody competing with him, to the point that he gets mad on Twitter about a random company doing the same thing as another company.
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  lmao imagine being threatened by some dude's hobby project that he's not monetizing - how weak is your business and especially ego if that is the case.
• jwilber 5y ago
  If the CEO didn’t throw a tantrum over the exact things his company claims to support (OSS, creativity, etc.), nobody would know about the intern’s weekend project. But he did, and now we’ll see something of a Streisand effect [0]. To be fair, it is kind of suspect to intern for a company and, at the end of that internship, turn around and create effectively the same thing. And OP’s dismissive tone and propensity to hand wave away things that may be relevant in his blogpost certainly don’t make them seem ideal to employ. But ‘suspect’ only in the sense that (in my personal opinion) it gives credence to the CEO’s comment on the intern being difficult. I still think replit is in the wrong here. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
  • colonwqbang 5y ago
    Is it really? It's what he learned to do at the company, so now he's doing it. If the product was really unique, maybe. But from the description it seems to be a generic online repl.
  • gabeio 5y ago
    I had nearly the same feeling while reading this and specifically finally getting to the part where the author mentions they were an intern. Being an intern at the company is kinda important to this story, had they not been an intern at the company I think this would have been a vastly different conversation. I honestly think both are in the wrong here, the CEO should have been a bit more relaxed about the handling of this. As well the intern really should have tried to stay away from projects which directly relate to past company business models. I also question if this article could be considered defamatory.
    • shkkmo 5y ago
      Non-competes are unethical and also illegal in California where replit is based. Edit: They aren't technically "illegal" in CA, just unenforceable.
      • gabeio 5y ago
• atarian 5y ago
  I just want to say how much I appreciate the author's courage in coming forward and disclosing this publicly. Too often, people are afraid of retaliation when shining a light on rotten behavior. If this CEO ever follows through with his threat, I will be sure to donate to a legal fund in your defense.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• aritmo 5y ago
  Looks like this "Replit" is a joke service. Too easy to replicate and no reason to use them.
• lbriner 5y ago
  It's probably annoying and upsetting but it is no different from any other legal dispute. All you have to remind yourself is that legal stuff is business-as-usual for any sized company about a handful of people. Are they correct legally or morally? Maybe, maybe not. Are your arguments compelling? Yes but I am not a lawyer and even if I was, the result is the same. Being correct doesn't avoid the legal action. They have more money than you and maybe they want to spend it trying to get you closed down. Maybe they win, maybe they won't but sadly it comes down to the same thing? Do you want to risk whatever outcome they are threatening and can you afford to? You could always wait to see what exactly they are alleging before taking action but if the CEO is a dickhead then he might not care about the details, and might sign off a few 10Ks of the budget just because he can. Welcome to business!
• mathattack 5y ago
  Companies definitely have to be careful about not coming too heavy handed. Many states also have protections for side projects. Even still, if you start a project that is very similar to your day job, you’re asking for trouble. Imagine you are the CEO and someone says, “Our intern is open sourcing something very similar to our core product.” That will always look bad and cause a reaction. How heavy handed the reaction is will vary, but every company will react.
• princevegeta89 5y ago
  OP seems to be pretty talented here. They were able to build a clone in no time. If Replit CEO had any brains he should have thought about hiring OP as an exceptional engineer and work with them.
  • ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
    Apparently he tried (and failed), which is perhaps further evidence of OPs talent.
• adsharma 5y ago
  The next cool thing is not "run python and 30 other languages online". It'll be write python, translate to other languages and then run them online. We're at 7. https://github.com/adsharma/py2many/ https://github.com/adsharma/py2many/
• oauea 5y ago
  Wow, absolutely pathetic. My company was evaluating this for pair programming and testing new hires, but just binned that idea. If anyone from replit is reading this: This is costing you business. Jetbrains Code With Me looks quite nice.
• forgotpwd16 5y ago
  So an intern goes to make an identical project to the one he worked in and present it as purely independent project? It is a bit strange, and there've been issues with other projects being copied that way before, but jumping directly to legal threatening is too much.
• einpoklum 5y ago
  > Naturally, I took down my project right away, gave it some time for feelings to cool, and sent Replit an apology. Once you (Radon) did that, it is quite unlikely you would be able to go back. It would be perceived as an admission of the validity of their claims, at least to some extent; and more importantly, they will get it in their heads that, using threats, they can keep your project offline. You then proceeded to apologize and recognize you may have hurt repl.it. That's another step of agreeing with their claim. So, by the time you ask us > "Is Replit right?" The answer is basically - it's right enough for you to have semi-admitted they're right and acted accordingly. So, yeah, case closed basically. Also, in your post you make all sorts "but what I did is harmless" arguments, which really aren't helping you - at least legally. If you're infringing on their legal IP rights, then it doesn't matter all that much that it's for a non-commercial purpose, or that you're not stealing their clients. Those are arguments for the part of the trial where the judge decides how much damages from you to award repl.it. > Why would Replit do this? Because it's a commercial company and it has reason to believe your activity will hurt their income, profits, or chances for survival. > However, Replit’s actions in this case reveal hypocrisy Commercial companies are almost necessarily hypocritical, since on the one hand, their interest is, and must be, the furthering of their owners' interests (so typically maximization of profits); but in this interest, it is useful for them to maintain an image of social responsibility, enlightenment, support of the furthering of technology etc. In some industries a company should also appear to be liberal, pro-LGBTQ, anti-racist and so on (especially if it has shady deals with the military-industrial complex, or foreign repressive governments etc). So, yeah, sure, they're hypocrites, but you must have been living under a rock to believe that they may _not_ by hypocritical. ----------- Bottom line: If you thought you didn't violate your contractual and legal obligations to them; and that your project wasn't an illegitimate clone, you should have stood your ground, kept the project up, and stated as much. You could then have told them that: 1. They would probably, or certainly, lose the litigation because they're wrong on the merits. 2. If they want to run a lawsuit with a bunch of expensive lawyers, they would waste a lot of their investment money on that, and you doubt their investors would appreciate it. 3. If they sued you, you make the whole thing very public - as you are obviously capable of doing - and the PR damage would be higher than whatever they hope to gain with their lawsuit against a zero-income zero-clients hobbyist project.
• xaceuu 5y ago
  I hope the CEO won't threat my Telegram bot projects. It's been on the Replit for a while, is there any other platforms that provide the same as Replit?
• pbecotte 5y ago
  I...am on the side of the company here? wierd... An employee of a company left, and then made an open source clone of the company's software. The fact that the software was easy to clone or that others had done it previously doesn't seem really relevant. Several times I have left a company, and I could replicate a good percentage of it in a couple days too, not because it was easy, but because the months/years of experience I had building it the first time. Whipping out the lawyers and bragging about his funding is idiotic and childish, but I think asking for the project to be taken down is completely reasonable. (on that note- I kind of think at this point that you have to be a megalomaniac to be a funded startup founder)
  • brianberns 5y ago
    Unless I’m misunderstanding something, the company’s software is already open source (https://github.com/replit https://github.com/replit), so cloning it is perfectly reasonable. If there’s any dispute here, I think it would be over the copyright to the cloned code (if it really is a clone), but the article doesn’t mention anything about that, so I suspect it isn’t actually cloned at all.
    • pbecotte 5y ago
      Just because a company has SOME open source software, probably doesn't mean that all of their software is.
  • sam0x17 5y ago
    But the point is, it's not an open source clone of anything proprietary. Their proprietary stuff is the collaborative capability they have added, accounts, sharing, etc. The stuff the intern replicated is a bunch of non-proprietary open source stuff (that they themselves open sourced), and he went well beyond what replit does by supporting hundreds of languages. They have zero chance legally of going anywhere with this other than scaring a small project out of existence. There is no case.
  • fighterpilot 5y ago
    Bad take. It's not a clone, for the reasons explained in the article. It's more akin to the multitude of "run code online" sites that already existed before Replit was started.
• smashah 5y ago
  This is insane behavior. OP shared something they were proud of to what seemed to be a mentor and then Amjad threatens OP? Damn! I was about to raise VC funding for legal protection from giants and this petty fool is swinging his schlong at his own ex intern? Wow.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• tombert 5y ago
  I love how companies just assume that they own everything you do even remotely similar to something they work on, even after you leave. Let's assume that this person did just copy the replit design (which I don't believe they did), so what? If it was able to be "cloned" in a weekend or two, clearly it wouldn't really be sufficient to take down replit, so it seems that the CEO of replit just thinks that if you've ever worked for their company, any time you work on any kind of vaguely-similar REPL software, you should be taken down. It's not like this is unique; corporations just seem to immediately assume that anything you did after seeing their brilliant and elegant code must be the reason for your success.
• Mulpze15 5y ago
  What if it was a purposeful Streisand effect, if we would assume there is not such thing as bad publicity. I bully a lone open source dev, everybody get fired up, I go front page HN, maybe as the bad guy, but now people hear about me, and total sign-up increase. Would be devilish, maybe would work?
  • aritmo 5y ago
    Perhaps in another dimension.
• belval 5y ago
  From the comments I know that this will not be a popular reply, but I do feel like he crossed a line by reproducing something he worked on commercially even if he had no intent of selling it. While everyone is rightfully astonished by the CEO unprofessional tone (and I really don't condone it), he did see the design documents, technical specs, and whatnot.
• 533474 5y ago
  Contact the FSF for advice, I'm sure they would like your project to join million others with legal backing!. Good luck!
• nerdponx 5y ago
  Wow, what a fuck-up. I canceled my Repl.it subscription already, and I intend to migrate off the site entirely as soon as I can.
• linuxfan2021 5y ago
  Repl.it should have no fear from this. A: There was no plans to make it commericial. B: It wasn't intended to be a CLONE.
• randomNumber7 5y ago
  Can someone with knowledge in law tell me? If (in another world) he made this project with commercial motive and used some of the design decisions, would this actually be illegal?
  • teraflop 5y ago
    Not a lawyer, but: Intellectual property rights fall into specific, legally-defined categories, such as copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. I don't see any hints that patents or trademarks are involved in this dispute in any way. Copyright violation seems unlikely, unless the intern improperly kept a copy of source code that he had access to while he was employed. I could maybe see an argument for misappropriation of trade secrets, but the company would have to be able to make an argument that whatever specific secret information he used gave them a real competitive advantage, and that they took reasonable steps to protect it. (Having talked about their tech stack in engineering blog posts, as the OP alleges, would provide him with a pretty strong defense.) If there's no IP infringement, then it doesn't matter whether there's a commercial motive or not.
• Driko04 5y ago
  anyone who has ever interviewed with Amjad knows hes two-faced. He had a posting for a marketing position open forever and would have you work about 3 weeks for the interview. He would ask for marketing campaigns and how to implementing them. thinking that he was testing your skill set but actually just stealing ideas. I use to use Repl.it but forget. I really hope this company burns. He lacks the understanding of what the face of a company means and every time i see or think about this company, i just remember how i was treated by the guy who supposedly wants to "change" the world and "help" people. he makes me sick
  • jollybean 5y ago
    So this is a serious claim, did this happen to you? Or is this a situation you have intimate knowledge of? Of is this hearsay?
    • creata 5y ago
      > i just remember how i was treated Pretty sure it's a personal recount.
  • amjadtwofaced 5y ago
    I second this. A lot of people who interfaced with him at Facebook has a lot to say about him being two faced and dishonest. Dude is the epitome of virtue signalling to any side that will give him money. YC has gone to shits that they couldn’t identify it.
  • ztratar 5y ago
    Just want to call this post out, as it sounds like someone who didn't pass an interview and is now very biased. I know the Repl.it team, including Amjad, and they're all some very upstanding people. I'm biased myself. Often there are localized judgement errors, and treating people via threat of the law is both a mistake (IMO) and also an unfortunately reality for running a company. It's hard to make a determination of what we'd all do if not in the shoes where a former employee is potentially stealing your code/IP.
• aneutron 5y ago
  If your business is threatened by a non-commercial one-man open source project, you have a lot more problems on your plate than that single "issue"
• cupofcoffee 5y ago
  I really don't understand why people jump to conclusions so fast without hearing both sides. I understand no one wants the small guy to be bullied by the company but it's ridiculously naive to assume that the entire truth is contained in that blog post.
• sam0x17 5y ago
  I'm an advisor for a large coding Bootcamp, and I was about to recommend they use Replit across the board for all of their students. I will now be recommending that people stay as far away from this company as possible. This kind of behavior is unethical and intolerable, and worse, suggestive of deeper issues with Replit's governance, decision making, etc. In the very least their poor decision making will now cost them a massive deal, so now there is a positive spin :)
  • canaryyellow 5y ago
    Thank you !
• jascii 5y ago
  Well, Repl.it sank from "oh, that's kinda cool" to "avoid at all cost in my book"...
• londons_explore 5y ago
  If I were the CEO in this position, I would make sure the intern had shares/stock options as part of their comp, and my reply would be: "Hi X,. It looks like a very cool project, but I'm slightly concerned that it's existence could hurt repl.it. And as shareholders, that could hurt both of us. Let me know if you want a video call to discuss further. X"
  • zemo 5y ago
    I seriously doubt he has any equity, he worked there for four months; most equity contracts have a one-year cliff.
    • londons_explore 5y ago
      Well that's a poor move on the CEOs side... Everyone who interacts with the company in any form should have some tiny amount of equity if legally possible, and some of it should be unvested, options, or restricted from sale.
• sangupta 5y ago
  Naturally, I took down my project right away... Did your internship had any no-conflict, no-compete clause for any future assignments? Or are you infringing on any patent? If not, there is no need to succumb to this bullying.
• domrdy 5y ago
  Interesting, I've wondered why you've taken it down! Your project was such a great help dealing with monaco-language-server, and I was really sad when it just vanished off of Github one day.
• heavyset_go 5y ago
  Because of Amjad Masad's words and actions, I won't be using Repl.it or anything Masad touches at all. I'll recommend the same to friends and colleagues, as well.
• fxtentacle 5y ago
  Replit’s CEO: “I owe my entire career to open-source” Copy, paste, threaten with lawsuit? => new product ready to launch All big three cloud providers monetize other people's open source projects by renting out hosted versions. Apparently, that's OK and highly profitable. So why look down on a startup CEO attempting to replicate the cloud success story?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• codegeek 5y ago
  Am I missing something ? You interned at a small company and then you built a very similar open source tool which is close to the core product they offer ? Whether the CEO is an asshole or not, I can't think of not agreeing with them here. Your "intentions" don't matter. If your work is very similar to your previous employer's , they have the right to ask you to take it down or come after you.
  • spacefiish 5y ago
    Yes, you are missing something. As stated numerous times in the article: > Replit’s core value proposition isn’t letting you run code online (you can do this in dozens of places for free), it’s the features they offer on top of running code. Riju categorically lacked all of these features, including: having a user account, saving your work, sharing your work, publishing webapps, persistent workspaces, discussion forums, integration with GitHub, etc. etc. > Replit makes a webapp you can use to run code online in different programming languages. This is nothing new (just Google “run python online” for proof), so Replit’s value proposition is extra features like sharing your work, installing third-party packages, and hosting webapps. The core value proposition of Riju (toy playground for hundres of esoteric languages) != the core value proposition of Replit (feature-rich online IDE environment with lots of integrations and additional support). The only thing they have in common is that you can run code online, and that's not an even close to an original idea by Replit in any way. The CEO making a claim that this project is "copying" Replit has no actual basis given that there are literally dozens of other "copies" out there that are closer to Replit than Riju ever is/was. I also have no idea how you can argue Riju is "very similar" to Replit, given how generic the technical common ground between them is. I also have no idea how you can argue it's a "tool" and not a toy, the author even explicitly said there was no practical purpose and served as an esoteric quarantine hobby project: > You might ask: Why did I spend so much time adding obscure programming languages to a webapp nobody was going to use? Well, let me put it this way: Is it the weirdest 2020 hobby you’ve seen? ... Riju is entirely non-commercial. Unlike Replit, I didn’t seek funding from any source—advertising, donations, fundraising, subscriptions, whatever. I have no interest in running a business, and never really wanted Riju to become too popular, since I was the one paying the server bill.
• danso 5y ago
  I definitely agree the CEO could've handled this better, in a way that wouldn't bring the Streisand effect down on him. But I also don't fault him for being suspicious when a former intern creates something that seemingly uses the same ideas and concepts that the intern directly worked on while at Replit. Even if the author's assertions (about not using any proprietary knowledge gained as an intern) are all 100% true — the CEO is supposed to take those claims at face value? Also, the author's full email [0] doesn't do him many favors; for a discussion of a project that purportedly consists completely of open-source and public ideas, there are a ton of redactions. Like: > "You're right that the existence of ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ was initially brought to my attention by my work at Repl.it. But then again, it also shows up on lists of popular ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ for JavaScript." I'm not a lawyer, but I simply just would not have written that first sentence. Hopefully ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ is something like "React.js", and the author is just being overly zealous in the light of Replit's legal threats. [0] https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2 https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2
  • DangitBobby 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing this. Any reservations I had in siding with the blog poster have been erased.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• thayne 5y ago
  The most frustrating thing about this to me is the implication that whether the OP was right or wrong is irrelevant because Repl.it has "lots of money" to spend on "top lawyers."
• yewenjie 5y ago
  Slightly off-topic - what is a secure way to run arbitrary code in arbitrary languages in a server? I know replit's polygott docker container allows it. https://github.com/replit/polygott/ https://github.com/replit/polygott/
  • detaro 5y ago
    Ideally, many small VMs. E.g. that's what AWS Lambda does.
  • ipodopt 5y ago
    I would look at how the major clouds are running their compute instances. This might help: https://www.nomadproject.io/ https://www.nomadproject.io/ Which is basically k8s but lets you use vms. I was thinking of using Tekton to make a CI/CD service at one point but I would pretty much need to smash the whole k8s VM/Node every time I do something and only allow one participant at a time. There are ways to run vm pods instead of containers in k8s but there are other issues at play. It's been a sec.
  • mgomez 5y ago
    Have a look at Firecracker for running microVMs (originally developed at AWS before becoming open source): https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/ https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/
• sequoia 5y ago
  I agree the CEO is being very silly and stupid, but author is a bit ambiguous about whether he is or isn't making a replit clone. "they say they make it easy to share and remix your creations—but when I tried to remix Replit itself" OK this makes it sound like the author is writing a replit clone, or as he calls it "remix." Referencing repl.it by name in commit messages: probably good to avoid this.
• coolgoose 5y ago
  So, any chance for a link to the open source project so we can accidently spawn a lot of new clones? :)
• 29athrowaway 5y ago
  There is a world of prior art before replit, there is absolutely nothing they can patent or bully you about. Do not apologize, that is an admission of guilt. Also, do not talk to that guy, you are making it worse. The guy's objective is to kill replit competitors, which is itself a monopolistic practice which is probably illegal. By the way, the guy sounds like a fucking jerk, I am closing my replit account. Good luck with your open source project.
• dogman144 5y ago
  Whoever is right here aside, this blog represents to me a common challenge IC/engineer/line worker types have understanding how the parts of the world, and related conflict resolution, actually works. I think it causes a lot of frustration for them and is present in a lot of different industries. In the spirit of pragmatism, this is what I think it looks like if you'd like to avoid this pattern in your own career management: - event happens driven by an IC-type - a conflict happens over the event which exists on the narrative plane, where facts are fuzzy and emotions/identities get pulled in. - the IC-type tries to get out of the conflict by listing a roster of facts, and sort of miss the boat on understanding that narrative conflicts don't really care about those facts. - IC-types, totally justifiably b/c yeah facts matter when sourcing intent, are some version of befuddled or angry or whatever, usually try more facts, but nonetheless the conflict just stays around - ultimately, they totally miss "the why" on why the conflict is actually happening, and as a result they are usually on the losing end of it This blog is chock full of this approach. What it really reminds me of, and why I mention it, is a series of essays posted by a well known, long serving, but non-mgmt reporter who was fired from a famous paper recently. Same issue. Facts themselves and the nuance involved made things look at least understandable, the narrative launched for other reasons, and the reporter was fired. The reporter issued a series of essays staying in facts-land after getting fired, highlighting the facts-driven counter the reporter tried while in-house. Despite overwhelming facts, you could tell the reporter just wasn't aware of what had actually turned against them/what they actually had to address if they wanted to stay. He was speaking Language A and the team he had to work with was speaking Language Z. Addressing a narrative isn't bending to it, but you need to counter it with something other than/in addition to the facts. These narratives can stay a long and have negative impacts much longer than you can "be right." Find the language of your criticism and make sure you counter in the same language.
• jfrunyon 5y ago
  "Fixed" title: "Replit asked former employee with thorough inside knowledge of their operations to take down copycat project which he sent directly to the CEO" It's like y'all have never heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design. No, building a direct competitor to a business you have previously worked for is generally not ethical, and will almost always end up being infringing, because even if you're not trying to copy their code/design/whatever, you almost certainly will. By the way, allowing users to run their own code, unsandboxed, on your dime, is generally a bad idea. What happens when someone uses it to distribute $illegal_material? Or send spam? Or starts logging what other people are running?
• FlyingSnake 5y ago
  Wow never expected Repl.it to be so rotten in the core. I’ve followed their journey and happily recommend them on several occasions. Looks like after getting YC branding all gloves came off, and the success has gotten in their heads. Such a pity.
• sam_lowry_ 5y ago
  Sigh. Now @pg will stop retweeting random Replit success stories.
• sabhiram 5y ago
  This is funny. They literally do nothing but copy existing workflows and jam it into a "webapp", who really is the copycat? I say you use this exposure to actually build a Lyft to their Uber. Show them who is really boss.
• 6510 5y ago
  I'm not 100% sure but I think you can't kill open-source projects even if you wanted to. It seems that after releasing something into the wild its up to other people? A court case [it seems] could at best limit use to IP holders?
• cphoover 5y ago
  One of the nice things about Repl.it was being able to spontaneously try out or demo code in front of a coworker or friend... Forcing signup/login introduces friction that makes the tool less useful
• tehalex 5y ago
  Why would any developer ever use replit again?
• aparsons 5y ago
  Amjad comes off as super insecure in this- and it’s not all that surprising considering REPL.it really has little or no competitive moat
  • clevergadget 5y ago
    lets be real, his response is the kind of thing you hear from someone whose ship is sinking and starts lashing out in every direction
• Arjuna144 5y ago
  After reading this I would definitely advise against working with the company behind repl.it. This is really poor behavior that seems to be motivated by fear and/or jealousy. Nothing of humanly high value can be expected of a company with such a shitty CEO
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  New CEOs: Don't talk so much. If you have to talk to someone outside your company, and it's not part of a business strategy, public relations, or other normal part of your job, and it seems important, do it through a lawyer. Not only is it scarier, the lawyer can tell you (in a nice way) to shut up.
• Shicholas 5y ago
  Unpopular opinion, IAAL and frankly Replit has a case that will pass the "motion to dismiss" stage when litigation starts getting expensive b/c of discovery. The OP worked for Replit and therefore had access to private source code or "trade secrets" before creating his project. It'd take expert testimony for the OP to prove in court that his OSS project was not influenced in any way by Replit's closed-source code, which imo is unlikely.
  • plank_time 5y ago
    lol you don’t know what you’re talking about in the least
    • Shicholas 5y ago
      even if I don't know what I'm talking about in the least, a judge would still have to assume everything in a pleading is true and imo Repl.it would have done enough to get there w/ trade secret allegations had OP not taken the OSS down.
    • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      Do you? Please, offer something material as a contibution instead of making fun of other people. My understanding that it this will probably pass a lawyers sniff test and expert testimony means that developers have to testify that the codebases are different.
  • adventureadmin 5y ago
    I'm surprised that others don't find mentioning your former company's name in a commit message, for similar software, an admission that you were inspired or thinking of that company's design. When software is both your hobby and your profession, you have to think carefully about what you mix and how. The developer also goes onto state that what he did is nothing new and he decides what repl.it's IP is on their behalf. Is this hinting that he wrote his new project in a similar way, but he believes it to be nothing special? Obviously the CEO's response was deplorable, but also probably a lesson to a new developer about mixing work and hobby.
• cycomanic 5y ago
  Those who are defending repl.it behaviour, did you notice that the guy interned with them in summer 2019? I mean even many NDAs or non-competes (leaving legality aside) would have expired after two years. I mean what secrets that are still relevant after 2 years could an intern taken away? If you have secrets like that would you let an intern anywhere close to them?
• dustymcp 5y ago
  This is an amazing ceo error, he probably lost way more goodwill on this reaching HN mainpage than he ever would have just leaving the project up.
• mr337 5y ago
  This looks like a company/CEO that loves to benefit from open source as long as it benefits them so strongly. Further more it looks like a CEO that can't innovate and the only options is to innovate through litigation. Must be something about that VC money burning a hole in their pocket to send lawyers vs adding features, marketing, or capturing new users.
• coupdejarnac 5y ago
  Well, this is a bummer. I was planning to make replit critical to one of my ventures. I've been receiving their emails for a while, and their chirpy nature always struck me as a bit odd.
• lez 5y ago
  Lesson learned: Don't feed the troll (the CEO of repl.it) - just ignore.
• faraaz98 5y ago
  I think the CEO feels threatened by this project and how the simplicity of it would make replit feel not so special. And it particularly offended by "replit superiority" commit. Running docker containers and giving them a frontend shell is not complicated enough to have "trade secrets". Given OP's code can't scale at all. This is just an insecure CEO
• dilawar 5y ago
  I just deleted my repl account. I rarely used it. I am not their paying customer so not sure if it counts but it is a small token of soliditary. Reading those emails from the CEO left a bad taste in mouth.
• rurban 5y ago
  If you got litigatious companies threatening you, the simpliest is to turn it into an official GNU project, and assign the copyright to the FSF. They'll happily fight the bastards.
• matthewheath 5y ago
  I'm very sad to hear that you were threatened with a lawsuit — it's an impressive project. Unclear what jurisdiction you're in (probably the US), but in the UK they would have a hard time arguing in court that your project damaged them.
• airocker 5y ago
  No idea is original and belongs to anyone. Even airplane was possibly derived by looking at birds flying. If you hire an intern and they want to use the understanding to open another company, it is the best thing that can happen to your business. Customers would not start coding online unless they see 20 options to do so.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mattbuilds 5y ago
  I already have trust issues with stuff like Replit and similar products that try to move everything off my computer that I own and control and on to their server. I see the value in it but I would never trust it. Good to see their CEO show his true colors.
• mindcrime 5y ago
  Everybody knows their own situation best, and makes decisions based on their values, beliefs, judgments, etc. And it's hard to question somebody else when you don't know all the inner details. But man, oh man, is it hard to read that and not kinda wish the guy had responded with something like: "Fuck You. Sue me if you want, you won't get a damn penny because I don't have it. And how are your VC's going to react to you wasting their money on a frivolous lawsuit. Come to think of it, I'll be reaching out to all of them to ask that very question..."
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Given he posted it on HN of all places, he effectively did just that, just in a longer form.
• paulcarroty 5y ago
  Just deleted Replit account, and heavily suggest the same action.
• abriosi 5y ago
  What an unfortunate set of events. I think both parties communicated badly with each other. It is easy to try to look at this in a binary fashion. In reality the situation is very complex and prone to misinterpretation. There are no excuses for childish behaviour though
• superasn 5y ago
  This repo is probably going to become the next youtube-dl on Github.
• tester756 5y ago
  >In my opinion, the answer to this question is no, for a number of reasons: but did you use "internal" knowledge of repl it in order to build it?
• acid__ 5y ago
  Amjad has tweeted about this: > There is a difference between copying a feature and actually getting intro a contract, and access to the code, copying it and calling it open-source. > As a matter of principle, when someone goes into your home and steals from you, even if it's not material, you have to respond. https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369 https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369
• diogotozzi 5y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20201004004511/https://github.com/raxod502/riju https://web.archive.org/web/20201004004511/https://github.co...
• Tade0 5y ago
  A healthy, competitive reponse to a single former intern one-upping you would be something among the lines of "ok, kid see if you can replicate THIS". Also a healthy response would be to issue a C&D - assuming they have a case here. But this? We don't have all the details and Replit might well be in the right here, but still - that's not how you handle such cases. And I should know, because I've been in trouble regarding my comments on HN with a company I used to work for, but the communication on their side was firm, polite and professional.
• kirillzubovsky 5y ago
  On one hand, SV is full of sociopathic founders who'd torture you for breakfast just for the giggles. On the other, being a founder is incredibly hard and very stressful, and when you are stressed lines get murky, and you sometimes do things that you wouldn't do if you took a moment to rest. I wouldn't immediately assume bad intentions where bad decisions in search for good outcomes were made. To know which one it was, one has to first know the people really well, and know them both when the times were good and the times were bad. Someone once told me: "Never assume, you make an ass of you and me (ass|u|me)."
• thatoneguytoo 5y ago
  If you follow Amjad on Twitter, it's evident that he is incredibly petty. Repl.it is a company with no moat. They are features are literally used by dozens (check the number of runs of the repls) Only companies which are so insecure about tech get into petty fights with college interns.
• SquibblesRedux 5y ago
  All of what I write here is my opinion based on what I have seen referenced in the original post. There could be facts or circumstances that I am unaware of that render such opinion ill-informed. Please don't sue me or take offense -- I offer only insight from quite a bit of life experience. From the email exchange posted [1], I would say Amjad was right in asking that the repository be taken down. Regardless of intent, Radon's actions had given the appearance of unethical behavior. Bear in mind that, when considering ethics, intent is not as important as appearance. While Amjad's statements were not necessarily optimal, I would not fault him for what he said. There are so many other adversities in life -- we should not make ourselves adversaries of one another. A couple red flags that stood out: (1) There is an implication that Amjad's time is owed to Radon. Radon's meticulous documentation and other content posted on the Internet is suggestive of overachievement and perfectionism, traits that can be very valuable in many technical domains. Unfortunately, personal correspondence usually is not one of those domains. One should always be most respectful of other people's time. Time is a non-renewable resource of unknown quantity. (2) Some of Radon's statements and expressions, whether they do or do not contain truth, are quite adversarial and should be avoided in correspondence. Those that stood out to me are "You are categorically in the wrong," "... you have no legal or ethical basis ...," "... I have acted in good faith ... [and] your conduct ... has been grossly rude and unprofessional," "Despite repeated inquiry on my part, you have refused to point to any specific feature ...," "... your characterization of the morality of my actions is baseless and in bad faith," and "It's a shame that you decided to terminate our relationship this way." In all things, regardless of the circumstances, the first rule should be "Be respectful." While I can imagine myself in Radon's shoes and empathize with what he did and why, experience has taught me that certain norms of civility, whether they be shallow or even illogical, are expected in discourse. My advise to Radon would be to let the whole thing slide. Life will bring so many more unexpected twists and turns; save time energy for life's truly important battles that are yet to come. [1] https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2 https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2
• throwaway928301 5y ago
  I interviewed for a job at repl.it a while ago. At the very beginning of the interview process I wanted to make sure that he would be ok with my rate (120k) and that we're on the same page, because coding interviews can be time consuming. After the interview process, he offered a contract-to-hire and low-balled at less than half of what we discussed at the start of the interview process, and then retracted the offer entirely 2 weeks later after negotiating and what I thought was part of onboarding... I did well in all of the interviews, but I had a bad experience at the final interview where I had trouble setting up the React/Typescript/Parcel tooling for the coding project, taking up a very significant chunk of the allotted time. Usually parcel doesn't give me grief and a breeze to set up, but I guess I had bad luck that day. I noted that I should prep the tooling for the stack before any timed interviews in the future. I finished everything except that part, but I had started to set up the final step with the algorithm set up for it and discussed how to do it in the follow up discussion. It seemed like were impressed by my knowledge and still seemed interested in me, so I thought there was a shot. So here's the abbreviated email chain: Amjad: "[...] we can't move forward with a fulltime offer at this time. However, what do you think about doing a 2-week contract project that if it goes well we'd extend a fulltime offer? If this sounds good to you, we'd talk about the terms of the fulltime offer before moving forward with the contract project so that you have an idea of the potential compensation for a full-time position." Me: "Yeah I'd definitely be interested in the contract-to-potential full-time offer. [...]" ...then a whole 2 weeks go by discussing over email with him on salary negotiation, W2, benefits, etc. The 2 week contract offer would be at the rate we agreed on for salary, and if it went well then I'd go on to full-time. I thought it was a done deal and he was just prepping the contract, but then a whole week goes by without hearing from him, so I follow up with him. He replied: Amjad: "So sorry for the delay, but we decided to go with someone else for the role. Let's stay in touch for future opportunities." Me: "I don't understand, we agreed on an offer two weeks ago. Is there any feedback you can give me if it's something on my end?" Amjad: "We didn't agree on an offer [...] so I suggested doing a contract as a way of an extended interview. And then we went back and forth and the details, meanwhile we continued to interview and found someone who's local and a better fit for the role. Sorry, this didn't go differently." Me: "[...] The way I interpreted it is that you've finished interviewing for the role and wanted to extend this trial-to-hire period, or a hire with a probation period, and if it didn't work out you'd extend the offer to your second pick. You didn't mention anything about an extended interview. [...]" Amjad: "I thought explaining where you didn't do well in the interview and saying "therefore we can't extend an offer" would be clear." It felt pretty shitty at the time...
• scotty79 5y ago
  Is it possible that CEO will get kicked out for bringing so much negative attention to the company?
• fredgrott 5y ago
  Some points: 1. I am not lawyer but: Is threatening someone with legal action illegal? Yes, if the intent is to resolve a good-faith dispute without litigation. But the threat of legal action without the intention of taking it may constitute extortion. Note that the person making the settlement request does not need to be right that the claim is winnable. But it must be made in good faith.Feb 24, 2020 OP needs to spend some coffee money and ask questions of a local attorney.
  • albedoa 5y ago
    No, the threat of legal action is not extortion regardless of the intention behind it. I see your disclaimer, but you went on to repeat a common misconception. It can be extortion to threaten to involve the police if demands are not met, but this is not that.
• prezjordan 5y ago
  2011: https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codecademy/ https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca...
  • contriban 5y ago
    Can you add more context? Why did you post this?
    • caslon 5y ago
      It demonstrates that he did something worse than what he's accusing his former intern of doing: Second, 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. Now, after you learn with Codecademy courses, you can use Codecademy Labs to create your own programs, share them via Twitter and Facebook, and show your friends what you’ve learned. Unlike Radon, he commercialized his "clone." It doesn't matter morally that he cloned what his previous employer did (and it's hard to argue that Radon's tool is a clone to begin with, not that there would be anything morally wrong with it), but it does highlight his hypocrisy.
      • lwb 5y ago
        Tbf, he made the first version of Replit as an open source project before joining Codecademy, and it's likely that retaining ownership of that project was part of his employment contract.
      • underwater 5y ago
        Amjad was one of the first engineers at Coder Academy. It's quite possible that that project was his baby, not just something he happened to work on. He also spent 3 years at Facebook between Coder and Repl.it, so it's not like he walked out the door with the idea.
        • DangitBobby 5y ago
• ilaksh 5y ago
  I feel that because the legal system is completely broken. Is there another way that we can deal with replit? This type of anti-competitive anti-open-source behavior should not be tolerated without consequence. https://replit.canny.io/general-feedback/p/how-replit-used-legal-threats-to-kill-an-open-source-project https://replit.canny.io/general-feedback/p/how-replit-used-l...
• trhway 5y ago
  >Every similarity between my project and Replit can be explained by looking only at GitHub repositories and blog posts that were published online by Replit itself, making them obviously not any kind of secret. [IANAL] while not a trade secret, isn't it a straight admission of IP reuse without explicit permission (until of course Replit published that stuff under GPL or the likes)
  • CRConrad 5y ago
    Do people often put up source code that isn't under some kind of FOSS license onto GitHub?
• maddyboo 5y ago
  Is it ironic that Amjad’s last tweet before this post hit the front page links to a hashtag on his website where people are building clones of famous games like Bejeweled, Mario, and Zelda? https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401760537390714882 https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401760537390714882 https://replit.com/apps/kaboom https://replit.com/apps/kaboom
• daneel_w 5y ago
  Put the project back up. Replit's CEO has already shat all over his dinner table.
• mousepilot 5y ago
  That company sucks but I predict they would win in court, simply because you made something that resembles their work, and thats plenty to convince a jury or the average judge. Sure, it sounds like a generic enough page, and there are plenty like it, but how many have been put up by an intern at a company that ALSO put one up. Additionally, you'll probably win here at HN, but in all probability you will not get a HN reader as either a judge or a jury. Might be an unpopular opinion but its mine!
  • alephu5 5y ago
    Is this illegal? In Europe it is part of the business landscape for groups of employees to break off and form competing companies.
    • mousepilot 5y ago
      In the USA its part of the business landscape to get sued.
• faheel 5y ago
  I'm going to build a repl.it clone too this weekend. Seems like a fun project!
• elihu 5y ago
  It seems like Replit's complaint probably doesn't have much merit, but at the same time Radon's defense that "this is just a non-commercial hobby project" doesn't really matter either (except to the extent that Replit might be able to get a bigger judgement if they prevail in court if they can show economic harm). He's either infringing on Replit's intellectual property or he isn't. As far as I know there isn't a special legal loophole for "I did this just for fun". (I'm not a lawyer, so don't interpret this as anything other than a possibly poorly-informed opinion.)
• fmakunbound 5y ago
  CEO has probably brought the Streisand Effect on himself. Any investor doing DD will find this apparently popular article the corresponding pile of comments on HN pointing out how trivial, unoriginal and un-innovative repl.it really is.
• ipaddr 5y ago
  This post alone is costing replit thousands because many developers reading this will treat them as toxic.
• abductee_hg 5y ago
  I am not sure that those threads are entirely legal.
• hirako2000 5y ago
  Forked it: https://github.com/hirako2000/riju https://github.com/hirako2000/riju Enjoy.
• huntermeyer 5y ago
  Repl.it CEO had this to say: > There is a difference between copying a feature and actually getting intro a contract, and access to the code, copying it and calling it open-source. > As a matter of principle, when someone goes into your home and steals from you, even if it's not material, you have to respond. https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369 https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369
  • iameli 5y ago
    Well, Amjad, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named CodeAcademy and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.
    • Stratoscope 5y ago
      For anyone not familiar with the reference: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_... Lots of great stories on folklore.org, recommended reading!
• lynxaegon 5y ago
  After reading the whole blog post.. i deleted my account from them. This is pure bullying which i don't agree with. I shall never use replit again.
• Havoc 5y ago
  I guess I'm not trying replit
• menzoic 5y ago
  Wow repl.it is no longer my goto. I will be finding another service that does the same thing.
• Giorgi 5y ago
  OP can you send me your code please? For reasons...
• gentleman11 5y ago
  Online ides worry me because I worry ip ownership and lawsuit stuff. Knowing that my ide is run by a litigious company who loves to throw money at lawyers to attack innocent people is a hardcore dealbreaker
• ltbarcly3 5y ago
  I think Replit knows that their entire business can be built by an intern with a few weeks of effort, and as a result is not valuable as a business in it's current state. They are obviously terrified that other people will realize this and there will be 500 clones out there by the time they figure out some defensible business model that locks in clients.
• hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Hopefully a Russian is reading this right now, and cloning Replit bit by bit. (Don't like bullies, especially new money guys.) Never thought I would have to say that as an American, but it seems like wealthy plaintiffs win too often, and it's not worth the risk? Hell--this jerk sounds like he might threaten you next with a Libel lawsuit. Think about deleting this post? If they do sue, and win you have a judgment against you. If you don't have any assets, they can't do much, but you don't seem judgment proof. Those judgements can attach your salary. They last 10 years, and can be renewed perpetually forever, at 10 percent. Ten percent people. (They should not be 10 percent. I'm in CA.) It's too bad our civil court system can be so unethically gaguged by money. I'm thinking about doing my own Chapter 7, and it's been scaring me for years now. I'm so broke I could probally ride it out, but I want that judgment off me. It has really affected my life in a bad way.
  • kgeist 5y ago
    >Hopefully a Russian is reading this right now, and cloning Replit bit by bit. I'm taking notes
    • havocsupreme 5y ago
      You made my day
• jascii 5y ago
  Looks like Amjad doubled down on this: https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369 https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401957368510906369
• tommoor 5y ago
  > 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-codecademy/ https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca... Edit: See Amjad's response below – seems Repl.it may have pre-dated this hiring in which case it makes the irony slightly less delicious. Did no learnings from scaling the concept at Codeacademy make it into the current product?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • simonhamp 5y ago
    Cheaters always watching over their shoulder. How can you trust people if you know they can't trust you? Or worse, you can't trust yourself!
    • ztratar 5y ago
      Just going out to say the amount of speculation on this thread combined with character assassination is pretty shitty. This is one side of the story, we don't have much evidence either direction, and it's not clear there was any "cheating" involved in anyone's past. HN should do better.
      • truetraveller 5y ago
        Couldn't agree more.
      • threatofrain 5y ago
        The CEO Amjad Masad has responded in this post. This is a story told with receipts, and receipts carry a weight of their own. Namely, private emails made public. You can see for yourself whether you'll ever see the other side speak through the language of receipts. So far all he has done is double down on the story told through the emails.
• jlengrand 5y ago
  Very tangential, but I've always looked weird at Replit because my first interaction with the product ever was through this tweet : "We're the most ambitious software startup in history." [1] My second interaction is this one ... [1] https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1342891578394882051 https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1342891578394882051
• 123123as1asd12 5y ago
  I think both of you are wrong. One, you worked for them then took their idea (which they took form someone else) and made an open sourced better version of it. I don't care if you did not use any internal information, it looks like you did to everyone else. Two, Why the hell did you share it with him? to rub it in? Three, actually I'm on his side, even though he is acting childish.
• ezekg 5y ago
  Not a good look that this may make the top 30 HN posts of all time by the end of the day. [0] [0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• edumucelli 5y ago
  I think this will be a "streisand effect" at its best.
• NmAmDa 5y ago
  The CEO instead of even representing his side in a proper way and justify his accusation of source code copying, he instead retweeted another random guy tweet complaining that people here at HN are shredding him. He seem to consider himself a victim. https://twitter.com/amasad https://twitter.com/amasad I think it is good thing that people start punish these CEOs who believe they can do whatever they want and that world revolve around their product.
  • b0afc375b5 5y ago
    > He seem to consider himself a victim. This isn't surprising given Dale Carnegie's first principle from "How to win friends and influence people" 1. Do not criticize, condemn, or complain > people do not blame themselves for anything, and therefore they don’t take criticism well
• cocktailpeanuts 5y ago
  It's kinda funny how this whole drama is for copying some "intellectual property" that anyone can easily build. If you don't want your virtual cloud sandbox app to be copied easily, build something that actually is novel. For example see Stackblitz https://stackblitz.com/ https://stackblitz.com/ I think they're going to completely destroy all these Replit-like models.
• fleddr 5y ago
  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 appalling. You may believe it to be quite alright if the person in question is only evil enough, yet I still object even in that case. It breaks the basic expectation of private communication. It smears the person publicly, whom may see his online reputation significantly damaged, possibly forever. It's impossible to defend yourself against public smearing, as the more you try to counter it, the more attention you give to the original issue, only further increasing damage. I must be old school to believe that private communication is to remain private. Furthermore, the victim (whom I fully believe to be a victim) just showed to the world how easily he doxes work relations, which doesn't look great for future employment. Again, I'm morally on the side of the blogger, but I believe this article could have been far less intrusive by leaving out specific names of individuals. You'd still get the point across. The real truth is of course that I'm old. Private communication should be treated as a thing of the past. Youngsters don't acknowledge this code of honor, and therefore one should treat private comms as public.
  • oliverx0 5y ago
    I think the email chain actually reveals the extent to which the blogger tried to salvage the relationship and the project, and how he was acting in good faith. Explaining that this communication happened with the CEO of the company is actually an important detail that should not be left out. I do however appreciate that one would expect private communications to remain private, but in this case I think it was warranted to include such details. Basically, I don't think there is generic approach toward revealing private communication, and it should be done on a case by case basis depending on how important the details of such conversations are. EDIT: I would also point out that: > "Furthermore, the victim (whom I fully believe to be a victim) just showed to the world how easily he doxes work relations, which doesn't look great for future employment.". My impression after reading his blog post was actually the opposite, I would hire the blogger in heartbeat if I could.
• xbp 5y ago
  Appalling and completely unacceptable behavior from a company so committed to being a conduit for open-source innovation. Slightly unrelated: I used to shamelessly promote repl.it a couple years ago, but no longer do because their app has become so bloated and hard to use that it's discouraging to beginners -- recently I tried to remotely help a non-technical friend w/ an assignment and we must've spent ~20 minutes dealing with account creation, sending the correct invite link, and making sure we could both see our changes; it felt like a terrible waste of time especially as I kept reminding them "I promise it's worth it this app rocks!" The app used to actually be awesome back when you could spin up an env in seconds, send the link to a friend, and immediately start collaborating.. Hopefully this will be the nail in the coffin, or at least lead to a mass migration from the platform.. :/
  • DangitBobby 5y ago
    I only want something with slightly less friction than a jupyter notebook but better for controlled editing that an ipython shell. Something that doesnt make any files on my filesystem or anything else that I have to clean up later. That's why I'm looking for an online repl! Okay, I can live with having to be logged in because it keeps me logged in for a long time, but do I really need to figure out what I want to call this "project" which is two functions and a print that I never want the world to see? For a few glorious years, repl.it was exactly what I wanted when it came to writing derpy little one-off functions.
    • protoduction 5y ago
      I'm building Starboard, https://starboard.gg https://starboard.gg, maybe that fits your needs? It runs in the browser itself and is open source.
      • DangitBobby 5y ago
        Oooh this is very neat! I love the confetti button part of the demo. I will try to remember this next time I reach for an online repl.
• movedx 5y ago
  Give me the code. I'll host it on my GitHub.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  This whole comments section looks like a Twitter pitchfork mob. The guy didn't decapitate a puppy, he threatened someone with legal action. Et tu, HN?
• sacomo 5y ago
  I'm outraged! I'll never use Replit again! (this is the first time I've heard of replit.... I've never needed, never will...)
• darkhorse13 5y ago
  This is honestly pretty disgusting behavior. I hope an actual commercial clone pops up soon, so this type of behavior is avoided in the future.
• readonthegoapp 5y ago
  i'll put in some money to build out this open-source vision.
• amasad 5y ago
  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 more than a decade to build something, and that I now have a responsibility towards our community and supporters to be kind and model better behavior. I'm sorry I let you down and I promise to do better in the future.
  • chasebro 5y ago
    Wait, so after all that your position is that the intern is still in the wrong?
    • pmm98 5y ago
      Of course it is. The apology is intended for damage control to repl.it and his personal reputation, given he has had an hour to digest the winds of HN on both and is clearly concerned by what he sees. Dollars to donuts he remains baffled why such a defense of his reputation and that of his company is even necessary in the first place. You don’t even need to be as cynical as I am to get there. It’s that transparent. “I guess it’s just because of how I had to be as a struggling kid in Jordan” is the tell. He obviously has no idea why this feedback is happening if that’s his conclusion, so how can he apologize for any of it? He’s still retweeting sympathetic viewpoints on Twitter as we speak, so you can compute the honesty of this apology based on that fact alone. Read “do better” as “avoid generating compromising receipts wherein I twice trot out lawyers and my ability to pay for them like I’m dramatically unsheathing Anduril, while privately maintaining my view that I’m being ripped off at every turn because someone had the gall to use Docker to build a REPL and I consider that clearly genius architecture to be sensitive intellectual property.” His takeaway going forward is to threaten people in a smarter way, and I’d bet my next paycheck on that. Honestly, this whole saga is a hell of an invitation to compete against repl.it, in displaying such a severe decision-making and tactical weakness at the executive level.
    • 5y ago
• elmo2you 5y ago
  This sounds pretty much like straight up extortion to me. Threatening with abuse of the legal system (that is what this is, because those argument won't survive actual scrutiny) by someone with deep pockets, towards someone who clearly without those, is a serious criminal offence in my book. I mean literally criminal, not just morally or as a matter of speech. This isn't "just" bullying and this CEO does not deserve to walk away from this without damage. As far as I'm concerned, the only place this guy belongs is behind bars.
• jcrites 5y ago
  This is sadly ironic given that Repl.it is largely copying what Cloud9.io (a small company acquired by AWS), as well as a number of other companies already built and launched. It looks like the history of Cloud9.io's independent website (before it was AWS Cloud9 IDE) is now offline, and not in the Wayback Machine, so I can't link you to it, but you can see plenty of articles about the company in Google Search, some of which have screenshots of what they offered: https://www.google.com/search?q=startup+cloud9.io https://www.google.com/search?q=startup+cloud9.io They provided a very similar experience to Repl.it except you had a fully Linux development environment at your disposal, complete with a web-based IDE and terminal, auto-completion, and a suite of sample projects to get started with. Repl.it seemed like a copycat to me when I first learned about it. They don't have the same user experience model, since Cloud9.io required starting up a "workspace" for the language you wanted to use (very fast – instantiating a Docker container on a shared fleet); but close enough that I'd call Repl.it a clone-like competitor of Cloud9.io. Cloning a competitors isn't inherently bad. If you think you can improve on the user experience that they offer, then that's incremental process. But the hypocrisy of claiming that cloning other companies is wrong while engaging in it yourself rubs me the wrong way. Radon, if you want to put the GitHub project back up I'll be glad to mirror it and offer to pay for your first $100k in legal fees should you be sued by Repl.it. If the UI that you built is based on a UI that's published on the public company blog then I believe their claims will be tossed out of court pretty quickly. I'd also encourage you to get touch with the Electronic Freedom Foundation. They they are a nonprofit that may be able/willing to provide legal representation for free. P.S. Before considering this offer to pay your legal fees final, I'd want to review all previous contracts you've signed with the company, and consult my own lawyers. You seem to live in California which does not enforce non-compete contracts, so their only legal to stand on is that you misappropriated company intellectual property.
• shubik22 5y ago
  I don't have much to add about the behavior of Repl.it's CEO, but I find it amusing that he used "demanding" as a pejorative for the intern. "Entitled" or "unreasonable", sure, those characteristics are bad, but my initial reaction is that a "demanding" intern is one that I'd want to hire. In my experience, the worst characteristics of an intern are complacency and lack of initiative, and between a complacent intern and one who's "demanding", I'd choose the latter 10 times out of 10.
• warmcat 5y ago
  This will play out as it always has been. In the end, nothing will happen because of this revelation. Investors will keep on funding and things will go on as usual.
• jrockway 5y ago
  I've tried to comment on this article a few times, because I'm horrified, but can't really find the words. I guess the thing I keep coming back to is whether or not a CEO even has the power to engage "top lawyers" to settle a score with a former intern. I'm just kind of imagining the board meeting, where someone asks "how is that hiring going for a new principal engineer for the foobar team" and the CEO replied "we scrapped that position, I'm using the money to go after this intern that duplicated our website over the weekend." I have to imagine the reply isn't going to be "oh, great idea, keep me posted", but rather something more like "uhhhhhhh.... can we not?" Like, it just doesn't seem like a good financial decision to me. Let's say this is a solid case (which it isn't; or at least, nobody can point to the patent that's being infringed, or the literal source text that was illegally copied, or the NDA that Radon signed). The best case is you get a few hundred thousand dollars in damages. But the intern doesn't have that kind of money, so best case, it gets paid back in installments over many, many years. You are trading the opportunity to use that money right now to grow your company and make your investors rich, at the cost of not teaching some intern a lesson. It's unclear what sort of positive effect that could possibly have on the future of your company or an intern. OK, interns won't clone your product. That was pretty unlikely already, and reimplementing an idea is a lot easier than running a business. I guess I just don't see the point. All I can say is that Amjad was mad and personally hurt, and people do dumb things in that position. A CEO should see past that and say "you know what, I'm going to save this as a draft tonight and see how I feel in the morning". He didn't, and the company is probably over at this point. A lesson for us all -- sometimes you're mad, and can't do anything about it. Focus that energy into making your product better, or going for a run or something :) Finally, I guess to sum this up, it makes me sick to my stomach. Threatening someone a year out of college with financial ruin. Who does that!?! I feel terrible just standing by watching this.
• newintellectual 5y ago
  Gotta say, I’ll avoid using Repl.it in the future based on their douchebag behavior.
• databyte 5y ago
  Can I hard fork your project and host it? I have lawyers too.
• blunte 5y ago
  If humanity is one great experiment, I sadly predict that greed, fear of loss, and zero-sum behavior is the majority outcome. And for the record, I never liked repl.it because it was usually slow.
• xtat 5y ago
  Holy shit on so many levels. Repl.it needs new management and the old management should take a year off to reflect.
• MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  is repl.it also going to sue https://godbolt.org/ https://godbolt.org/ ?
• p5a0u9l 5y ago
  What the CEO did was wrong. Full stop. He apologized, and even if insincerely to salvage a damaged reputation, this is, as far as I know, his first documented incidence of dickery. So, why are most responses in here so caustic? It's like we're projecting all animosity toward "big bad corporations" on this one person, which seems intellectually lazy to me. People have bad days - I wouldn't want a bad day to define me. Maybe I'm wrong and this CEO is as ill-intentioned as there discourse seems. But, I'm not seeing that from the evidence given.
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  Lmaooooo I hope the replit lawyers are really good at keeping a straight face
• villgax 5y ago
  Lol how kind of him to give his permission...
• amirGi 5y ago
  It really worries me that only after going viral did this warrant an apology on Repl.it's front. Everyone makes mistakes naturally and it's great that they apologized but the wider issue of smaller players getting bullied by bigger players where we don't hear the stories (as we were fortunate this time) is scary.
• addicted 5y ago
  I particularly enjoyed the gaslighting by the Replit person about the author being the most demanding intern, a few emails after he tries to recruit the author by telling him how it’s grown and has hired senior engineers.
• llaolleh 5y ago
  This is a PR disaster. It's really hard to put a finger on who is in the wrong, because both the former intern(FI) and CEO screwed up. Out of so many things to build that could be fun, it's wrong to build something that you worked on, where a really good engineer/founder took you under their wings, taught you a ton. To take that and open source the secret sauce of a fragile startup in a competitive market... that's wrong. To publicly show confidential emails without warning - raises eyebrows. And if he is blocking out that much text, then this leads me to conclude he is downplaying their hardwork and innovation. However, it's wrong to threaten a young budding programmer with money and lawyers and brag about how we are not small anymore, and we have money now(20 million), which is not a lot in my opinion. They haven't built a moat yet. I really think all of this could have been avoided if the CEO took a more sequential and slower approach. 1. Ask the former intern to take it down nicely. If he says no, then you could ask him to close source certain parts of the program, and drop a backlink to Replit. The CEO could have taken a softer approach - you only take out the big stick when absolutely necessary. 2. He should have gotten on the call after the former intern asked him THREE times pleading to talk to him. I don't think it's right to treat a former starry eyed programmer who respects you like that - to outright ghost him... You spent 3 months mentoring the young grasshopper. I didn't like the way he treated that intern, and let the problem fester. That's not right. To me the right move is for CEO to be the bigger man, apologize, and try to make it right with OP. That's my assessment, but there could be more to the story... I would also like to note that this is why you NEVER impulsively write emails late at night when you're brain is tired and judgement a little compromised after a LONG day.
  • gtyras2mrs 5y ago
    > To take that and open source the secret sauce of a fragile startup in a competitive market.. i think that's absolute bollocks. Replit is not the first to pioneer running code online nor is the open-source project the secret sauce. The open-source project seems to be a toy he built for satisfying his own curiosity, not scalable beyond a single-server. Something that the guy admits can be brought down by a fork bomb. it has no user-accounts, no sharing features, no persistance -- nothing that makes it the "secret sauce". To quote the blog, >Replit’s core value proposition isn’t letting you run code online (you can do this in dozens of places for free), it’s the features they offer on top of running code. Running code online is not a novel idea that Replit came up with. It's the rest that made it appealing.
• ftomassetti 5y ago
  I will make a point of discouraging using Repl.it .
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bschwindHN 5y ago
  How many different teams/companies/individuals have made some sort of "run this code in a sandbox and stream it to a browser" type tools? I personally made one at my previous job in a few weeks, Replit exists, there's the Rust Playground, and probably countless others. It's just not that hard of a problem to solve, and not that special. Docker and Linux containers in general are the real innovation that has made it so easy to implement these types of services. Really pathetic on Replit's part to feel threatened and go after a weekend project like this.
• mirrormaster 5y ago
  Replit claims to support open source and this is how they react to a previous intern's project. This reflects poorly on Amjad and his ability as a CEO. I guess I dodged a bullet as this is another company I will stay away from.
• vzaliva 5y ago
  Legal and ethical issues aside, the bottom line I've learned from reading all quotes included in the blog post is that Amjad is an ass.
• sakoht 5y ago
  It is sad that, given that the company likely doesn't have a case unless some explicit IP was violated, that threats of court allow money to decide the outcome. But more sad than that, to me, is that creative energy on both sides isn't doing something more novel. A company doing something an intern can clone. An intern facing a sea of unsolved problems that chooses a space that is covered, as he points out, many times over. If copying is the highest form of flattery, why flatter your former boss so much?
• jyriand 5y ago
  This reminds me of a time when Shazam went overboard trying to stop a guy who implemented some kind of basic recognition algorithm based off of PHD thesis.
• milani 5y ago
  I'm amazed by Radon's thoughtful replies in the email threads and the blog post itself. Lesson for me is to resolve issues with dignity and patience.
• ericjang 5y ago
  I sincerely hope that someone as skilled & self-motivated as Radon is absolutely flooded with job offers due to the PR explosion of this blog post.
• dlsa 5y ago
  This is probably a reminder to throw some money at EFF to at least pay for their coffee if not their larger work. This is the kind of silly but serious case they've dealt with in the past.
• sam36 5y ago
  Both these guys sound autistic af. Goodnight.
• gorgoiler 5y ago
  Replit isn’t just about the tech. It’s about scale and marketing. They have to protect both of these if they want to be the place to go for online coding. Sure, you can plug Monaco into some backend in a weekend. Good for you. Can you support 100,000x active-last-minute on the same platform? Can you build a brand that means you even have to be able to handle 100k ALM? There are better ways Amjad could’ve handled this, but if you’re repulsed by the motive then HN is an odd place to air that revulsion.
  • dom96 5y ago
    It sounds like you are speaking to the author. I think it’s obvious they know how to do marketing (see how popular their blog post is proving). Scaling a platform to 100,000 isn’t hard, especially with millions in funding. HN isn’t odd at all. Replit is YC funded after all.
• howolduis 5y ago
  I have recommended repel.it to many people when I want to quickly show someone with no coding experience the results of a simple script or when I want to quickly collaborate on a small project. But now I will no longer support this project.
• shapiro92 5y ago
  on a seriously technical point of view. It is obvious the person kept the code repository and when making a new project the commit history (or part of it) moved together. So excluding how the CEO acted, it is obvious the intern has the codebase (or part of it) and I am pretty sure that under their contract they are not allowed to do what they did. As for the way they approach things, ye the CEO is from YC getting praised from PG on twitter, his Ego is beyond the moon and acts like it, dont expect anything more. Also Replit is INSANELY overvalued as a product.
  • stevenhuang 5y ago
    > It is obvious the person kept the code repository and when making a new project the commit history (or part of it) moved together What? There is no indication of that. What are you trying to say?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• timdaub 5y ago
  I can have empathy with the Replit CEO. I've had projects where strangers from the internet started to "friendly-copy"/fork things I either had talked about or that I straight out did. I didn't speak up and I ended up feeling super discouraged to continue the copied project. In the end neither the copycat nor I had success. But had he collaborated instead of doing his own thing, things would be different now. I get it, threatening with legal action is harsh. This blog post on the other hand is also not nice. For me personally, I'd rather not engage with either of the two as they seem to not being able to manage a professional conflict without spilling it publicly.
• hermitsings 5y ago
  Good you posted this here!
• hermitsings 5y ago
  I used to like Amjad. Now its 50-50.
• jedwhite 5y ago
  This made me think of a post by Philip Kaplan (Pud) called 'Fucking Sue Me" back in 2011, which was controversial at the time. The original post is long-gone, but there are a few copies out there [1], and there was a HN thread at the time [2]. He runs DistroKid now. He famously (infamously?) created the site Fucked Company way-back-when chronicling the dotcom bust [3]. [1] https://archive.vn/QHkz8 https://archive.vn/QHkz8 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15155068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15155068 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
• schappim 5y ago
  It is pretty amazing this has cracked the top 10 HN stories of all time: https://hn.algolia.com/?q= https://hn.algolia.com/?q=*
• tavish1 5y ago
  This guy handled this as best as can be. The relationship with this company, though 'healed' is basically just a burned bridge, because of the CEO's manipulative behavior, no fault of this guy. The biggest mistake of the CEO is equating an intern with someone who probably doesn't enough about copyright laws and open source licenses and will scare easy. Good on them, and looking at their website, the projects they have listed are excellent, and they need not worry about this company. If your product (which is not novel) can be replaced by someone's hobby project, you should probably diversify.
• marcus_cemes 5y ago
  As part of my summer internship, I had to sign a similar "anti-competion clause", stating I couldn't work in any similar company or compete in the same domain for the next 5 years. I'm a 20-year-old student, I'll be working on the marketing team to assist with web design and photography for a few weeks in a bio-medical start-up. Is it really necessary? I feel that it does more damage to me than the company by limiting my employment choices in the near future, I'm there to promote the company, not steal years of research.
• cl3misch 5y ago
  This seems to be hidden from HN, but the link [1] still works. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
  • detaro 5y ago
    It's literally still on the front page...
• pcaversaccio 5y ago
  Also checkout the Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/nulyx0/how_replit_used_legal_threats_to_kill_my/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/nulyx0/how_rep...
• olswan 5y ago
  Well done for... 1. Not reacting back in an unprofessional manner which I can assume would be easy to do so as you put some hours into the project 2. Taking this all in your stride and in a way getting more attention to your skill set than the original idea would of done Congrats!
• maydup-nem 5y ago
  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.
• AndrewChamp 5y ago
  Great post. Well documented, by an articulate author. There aren't many posts that can lock me in to reading to the bottom of the page. I must ask, is it unethical to publicly share screenshots of a conversation. I suppose in this case it almost went to court and thus would be public record if it would have. I only ask out of curiosity due to my slight feeling of guilt reading these private messages with only one-party's consent. I don't mean legally, only ethically.
• Lilykhan 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing, happy to see that you get your project published again. keep coding, best of luck. :)
• Railsify 5y ago
  So, when are you adding account management and github integration?
• tediousdemise 5y ago
  I'm surprised this hasn't been censored yet. Companies have a lot of insulation from criticism on HN, particularly in the "Who Is Hiring" monthly threads and sponsored front page posts. Apparently criticism of companies is "off topic" in such threads, so companies that openly engage in unethical or illegal behavior such as copyright infringement have free reign. Here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27363823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27363823 Somebody needs to flush the toilet and get their shit out of here, it stinks.
• corroclaro 5y ago
  Effective immediately I guess I will be discouraging the use of repl.it to everyone I know. I cannot stand bullies who backstab new members of the FOSS community, despite posturing about their love for F/OSS and the spirit of libre software. In a just world, whoever now holds the US patents for running-a-gui-box-that-is-network-presentable-and-can-evaluate-user-code (Xerox Parc? Sun? Oh, wouldn't it be lovely if it was Larry's lawyers!) would sue the bejeezus out of your low moat offering out of sympathy with the kid, Amjad Masad.
• arendtio 5y ago
  In my opinion, Randon should not put Ruji back online. I think it would show that he respects the opinion of Amjad, even though Amjad has acted immaturely and completely inappropriate in the first place.
• PiotrGrochowski 5y ago
  GitHub is a huge pile of toxic waste (unethical developers keep reporting my accounts and taking them down), and Netlify suspends my account with absolutely no details beyond "you’ve violated our terms of service". Now where do I go next?