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That was a clone of Replit that we made work at Codecademy. I started working on Replit (or repl.it) back when I was a student in Jordan. I didn't have a laptop

by amasad 5y ago

That was a clone of Replit that we made work at Codecademy. I started working on Replit (or repl.it) back when I was a student in Jordan. I didn't have a laptop so every time I wanted to get some programming done I had to setup a development environment at the university or at work. The idea for Replit was when you needed a repl to do some coding you should easily get one from anywhere including a mobile device. I thought it would benefit many people, especially those who don't have the means to buy expensive computers. It took 2 years of work to get something working and in 2011 we launched on HN (2011 web archive snapshot here https://web.archive.org/web/20111007050930/http://repl.it/ https://web.archive.org/web/20111007050930/http://repl.it/ and HN launch here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3056490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3056490). It was the first of its kind and it inspired a lot of projects and still does today. It was totally open-source (https://github.com/replit-archive/repl.it https://github.com/replit-archive/repl.it) and after the launch it was used as infrastructure by Codecademy (which later employed me) and Udacity and many others to deliver interactive coding in the browser. I was thrilled about that. Now, a lot of people implicitly assume that in a dispute between for-profit company and an open-source project, the for-profit company must be in the wrong. But there is some line that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product (if you don't believe that, you can stop reading now, because no argument will convince you) and I think to someone who knew Replit's architecture well, this project would clearly be across it. It copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws. That's the hallmark of copying versus merely writing one's own program to solve the same problem.

zxzax 5y ago
Hi Amjad, thanks for taking the time to respond. Can you please talk to Radon and work with him to remove the offending "unique and invisible" aspects, to make it so he can put his project back up? There must be some way to make it so that these projects can co-exist without causing any trouble, and it can probably done in a way that is much cheaper than bringing a lawsuit.
- amasad 5y ago
  Done.
soneca 5y ago
If the author was maliciously crossing the ethical line, why they would show the project privately to you? If the author was not maliciously crossing the ethical line, why were you so quick to threaten legal action and bully them by mentioning that you had the money to make it dangerous for them?
- andrewchambers 5y ago
  They might if they were seeking approval to show as later evidence.
  - hitekker 5y ago
    The phrase that comes to mind is "Xanatos Gambit" https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit
kyawzazaw 5y ago
Do you feel the same about Zoom's CEO and Jet.com's CEO?
- jevgeni 5y ago
  Probably not, since they have more money and can’t be outlawyered like an intern could.
  - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
    This is what it boils down to, isn't it? No one bats an eye when an employee of some large company switches to another competitor of noticeable size. But a single person is obviously easy to stomp into submission, and in this case it appears to have happened out of pettiness, a suspicion that is really brought home by the quick threats and the weird "work for us...no wait you were a bad co-worker anyway!" bait and switch.
    - jevgeni 5y ago
      Yes! It boils down to "I can pay money, so that you would need to pay money, and since I have more money, you'll go bankrupt quicker." I'm not all too sure about American laws, but in Europe Amjad's argumentation, especially about "design decisions" is very weak. So it seems, that it's not about even having a stronger legal case. Just the ability to throw money at the problem.
whoisjuan 5y ago
Could you explain roughly what was the biggest tell that he copied Replit's architecture patterns? No need to go into details, but perhaps this would make your side of the story more clear. So far we only have seen Radon's post and emails screenshots. He seems to be very adamant about not copying any of Replit's IP. But clearly every story has two sides and I think it's very important to hear yours. Hopefully it will come in the form of a blog post or similar. Genuinely curious and not taking sides with anyone here. I just believe that the OSS community can learn from this.
- truetraveller 5y ago
  Copied or not, if he signed a non-compete, he is violating the agreement. His project absolutely competes with Replit. Do you agree with this?
  - thebradbain 5y ago
    Noncompetes are illegal and unenforceable in California, where Repl.it is incorporated. So if he signed a noncompete, it would actually be Repl.it that is in the wrong here, not him.
    - gip 5y ago
      I am not sure they are 'illegal' - do you have a source for this? That being said, most non-competes are not enfoceable in Californina that's true. And that is a very good thing imo and a net positive for innovation.
      - jcrites 5y ago
        According to the California Business and Professions Code Section 16600, “every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.” https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=BPC&sectionNum=16600 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio.... This does not make contracts containing such clauses "illegal", but rather unenforceable in court. The student could sign a contract saying "I will not work on a company that competes with Repl.it", and he did, and the company tried to sue him over it with that as the only claim, then the court would quickly grant a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
nonbirithm 5y ago
> there is some line that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product Depending on the severity of the offense and the circumstances this would make sense, but this was just a small project, not an entire VC-backed service. Would you be willing to provide concrete evidence to show that the intern was actually copying the specifics of your product? As it stands many of us are not convinced that this is the case. What are these "unique, invisible aspects" of Replit that you are referring to which are so integral to merit legal action from you? And do you believe it was justified against a project that was never even intended to be anything more than a hobbyist activity?
NmAmDa 5y ago
So your proof that he copied a source code in the project is you saying that “if you are not convinced by my accusation which I didn’t prove, then stop reading because nothing will convince you”. have you missed logic class? no one told you before that the burden of proof is on the accuser?
mindcrime 5y ago
It copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws. That's the hallmark of copying versus merely writing one's own program to solve the same problem. Or the hallmark of having experience working in a particular domain, and simply favoring techniques and approaches that are familiar. Is there any particular reason why anybody should believe that any of these "unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture" constitute any kind of genuine "intellectual property" in either a legal OR moral sense?? I mean, if you're arguing that he literally copied copyrighted code, then sure, OK, maybe you have something. But nebulous appeals to "design decisions?" Don't expect many people to have sympathy for that. At some point you're treading into "anybody who ever worked for a company making cars can never work for another car company" or "A guy who makes a new chair owes money to everyone who ever built a chair" territory.
- mmastrac 5y ago
  What's interesting is that the redacted full thread alludes to some of these invisible aspects, and Radon appears to have a justification for doing things that way (though it's all blacked out so we cannot evaluate the merits of that argument). https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2 https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2 https://github.com/replit/upm https://github.com/replit/upm is likely one of the blacked-out bits in that email, as Radon says he wrote the README.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    I find it telling that Radon wrote out an extensive explanation of why he believes his project is not based on replit, and Amjad basically responds with "you're wrong, you copied it" without addressing anything Radon said.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      To be fair, there’s only a few ways to say that the correct solution seems obvious in hindsight. I agree with Amjad there. I just don’t think that working with something means you can never use those patterns again. That’s ridiculous. If I couldn’t use any of the patterns that I learned about in previous jobs I would still be programming as if I had 1 year of university experience.
tw04 5y ago
>It copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws. And yet you haven’t managed to tell anyone what these “invisible” aspects are. So it kind of just sounds like you’re making things up.
- truetraveller 5y ago
  What right does the public have to know this? None. It's their secret sauce, it's reasonable they don't want to publicize it. Obviously, Radon has every right to know. But not us.
  - Elidrake24 5y ago
    They made claims and threatened legal action; certainly the public doesn’t need to legally know until a lawsuit is actually brought, but they would be required to present such evidence to the public in court. Do they have to currently? No, of course not. But this isn’t someone claiming that another did something behind closed doors to bait public disclosure. They opened this door by making the claims, from a standpoint of whether one might want to do business with replit in the future it’s entirely reasonable to ask for proof of what otherwise are slanderous claims.
    - otterley 5y ago
      You don’t have to reveal your trade secrets in open court. They can be shown to the judge “in camera” and redacted from public filings. If all you had to do to get a company to reveal all its secrets were to sue it on some plausible legal theory and conduct discovery, everyone would do it.
      - Barrin92 5y ago
        >You don’t have to reveal your trade secrets in open court well excellent that we're not in a court here on HN or Twitter then. If he decides to intimidate someone without putting any concrete evidence up for it we're well within our rights to drag him over the coals for it. Dogs that bark don't bite, if he wanted to avoid this he should have gone to his lawyers directly, instead he's already issuing half-baked apologies in this very thread. Which means he has zilch and just wanted to bully a recent graduate into taking his product off the internet.
rizpanjwani 5y ago
this is disappointing behaviour. are there any alternatives to repl.it one can recommend? I don't want to use it anymore.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- acmj 5y ago
  There is https://ideone.com https://ideone.com. I compared several similar services last year, including repl.it of course. I liked ideone better for some reason I forgot. PS: I have just checked repl.it again. Its UI has been changed a lot and it seems to require signup now, which makes me even less likely to use it.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  I hear there’s this project called Ruji that has more than 200 languages. Unfortunately it seems to be taken down.
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  codesandbox.io is quite good too
ahmedalsudani 5y ago
repl.it has been a project I've admired and recommended for a long time. The same can be said for many members of this community. A few reasons why there's so much anger, in my estimation: - When you support a project, you want its leaders to embody decent values. - You have always projected an image of someone who's "nice" and doing things right. You cannot bully your intern in private and keep that image. - Most importantly, you are now in the Goliath position and you are acting tyrannically. It's hard to side with someone going "I have raised $20M and I will use it to crush you" to their previous intern. The fact that you did not explain your concerns, jumped straight to legal threats, and did not want to talk after the project was taken down looks quite bad. If you had approached it in a more diplomatic fashion, you would not be public enemy #1 on HN. Understand the position you're in. You wield a big stick; speak softly. P.S. it's perfectly understandable that you'd have concerns about the project, though IMHO it's an overreaction. That's not the issue. The issue is _how_ you approached it.
- truetraveller 5y ago
  The anger is exaggerated, and there are still many unknowns. Did he sign a non-compete agreement? If so, the intern would be breaking that agreement. It makes no difference if he raised $20 million or $100 million. There is nothing "tyrannical" about that. I suppose you are a Muslim from your name. The Muslim stays silent when he is unsure. He stays clear of "drama". He thinks the best of other humans, and especially of his Muslim brothers.
- amasad 5y ago
  Thank you -- this is really good feedback.
  - windexh8er 5y ago
    It is great feedback. Feedback that you failed to execute on in a spectacular manner. You've lost my group as customers today. In no way will I knowingly support a founder with such a broken perspective on prior art.
    - 5y ago
jarenmf 5y ago
No one is assuming anything. That's your email there where you bullied the guy. You could have been nice about it but instead you wanted to intimidate him by threatening to sue him. If you wanna make this right I think you should acknowledge that you overreacted and apologize to him.
tomnipotent 5y ago
> a lot of people implicitly assume Considering your existing cred, I'm sure many in the community would give you the benefit of the doubt if addressed the issue head-on and explained what was infringed instead of what reads as emotionally charged responses. And if you're holding out for legal reasons, I imagine that would make the community more outraged because it escalates an accidental bad faith incident into a intentional one.
smusamashah 5y ago
Ideon existed since 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20091214124037/http://ideone.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20091214124037/http://ideone.com...
kabdib 5y ago
There's a big difference between hard-won technology (worthwhile protecting with patents, or trade secret law) and "this is how we designed this iteration of the project." Of course your implementation is secret (because it's closed source). That doesn't make it valuable enough to sue over, unless you want to be in the same camp as the asshats at Oracle / SCO. If you didn't seriously consider obtaining patents for your efforts (and then decide to keep them as trade secrets, for whatever reason) then they're probably not valuable enough to jumpstart lawyers. At the moment, I think you've done a fair amount of damage to your company's reputation. If I were on your board, we would be having some hard conversations right now.
frabjoused 5y ago
I wouldn't recommend attempting a rebuttal when you've just hit the top 30 HN posts of all time. Pretty much your best option is to apologize.
truetraveller 5y ago
Amjad, don't worry about some of the HN crowd putting you down. When a non-compete agreement is signed, it must be honored. Some (not all) of these people are in my opinion, hypocritical and/or jealous and/or just plain evil. They want to see you go down. If you must, issue an "apology" to appease these obnoxious folk. Unfortunately, that's how the world is nowadays.
- phonon 5y ago
  > When a non-compete agreement is signed, it must be honored. Not correct; it's considered against public policy in California. https://www.employmentrightscalifornia.com/can-my-california-employer-enforce-a-non-compete-agreement/ https://www.employmentrightscalifornia.com/can-my-california... حَدَّثَنَا مُسَدَّدٌ، حَدَّثَنَا يَحْيَى، عَنْ عُبَيْدِ اللَّهِ، قَالَ حَدَّثَنِي نَافِعٌ، عَنِ ابْنِ عُمَرَ ـ رضى الله عنهما ـ عَنِ النَّبِيِّ صلى الله عليه وسلم‏.‏ وَحَدَّثَنِي مُحَمَّدُ بْنُ صَبَّاحٍ، حَدَّثَنَا إِسْمَاعِيلُ بْنُ زَكَرِيَّاءَ، عَنْ عُبَيْدِ اللَّهِ، عَنْ نَافِعٍ، عَنِ ابْنِ عُمَرَ ـ رضى الله عنهما ـ عَنِ النَّبِيِّ صلى الله عليه وسلم قَالَ ‏ "‏ السَّمْعُ وَالطَّاعَةُ حَقٌّ، مَا لَمْ يُؤْمَرْ بِالْمَعْصِيَةِ، فَإِذَا أُمِرَ بِمَعْصِيَةٍ فَلاَ سَمْعَ وَلاَ طَاعَةَ ‏"‏‏.‏
  - truetraveller 5y ago
    Okay, that's a good find about California law. But there are exceptions and loop-holes. They probably would not apply here. JazakAllah Khair for the hadeeth. There's another hadeeth: "The Muslims are bound by their conditions". So, what takes precedence: an agreement between two people, or the law of the land? That's a good question, actually!
    - phonon 5y ago
      بَيْعَة‎ لَقَدْ رَضِيَ اللَّهُ عَنِ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ إِذْ يُبَايِعُونَكَ تَحْتَ الشَّجَرَةِ فَعَلِمَ مَا فِي قُلُوبِهِمْ فَأَنزَلَ السَّكِينَةَ عَلَيْهِمْ وَأَثَابَهُمْ فَتْحًا قَرِيبًا
    - mmastrac 5y ago
      The law of the land takes precedence. Contracts can be signed in a situation where there is a power imbalance and courts will often nullify or modify those agreements, despite them being made between two consenting parties.
nradov 5y ago
What is the specific legal accusation that you're making here? Contract violation? Copyright violation? Patent violation? Trade secret theft? Ethical lines are not legally relevant.
morganvachon 5y ago
Edit: and just like that, threatened with legal action over my comment. Just like Radon I don't have the resources to fight a legal battle so I'm deleting my comment.
jcrites 5y ago
California law does not recognize non-compete agreements. Your heardquarters are in San Francisco. Good luck. Unless you have ironclad evidence that he stole intellectual property from your company you don't have a legal case to stand on. I have offered to pay the student's legal fees in exchange for putting the GitHub repository back up, with the provision of reviewing the contracts he signed with you to ensure there is no terms that he could be violating, after review with my own lawyers. I was also considering working for your company when considering changing forms, but I never would after hearing about this episode. Your remarks about "YC shouldn't fund copycats" are especially ironic given that Repl.it is by far not the first company to make programming online easy to do. I was involved in acquisition of Cloud9.io (now AWS Cloud9 IDE – the original site has been taken down from the Wayback Machine but you can see plenty of their work in articles if you search Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=cloud9+io+startup https://www.google.com/search?q=cloud9+io+startup ) – they provided an online IDE, terminal, full Linux environment, and the ability to program in many different programming languages. Personally, I don't have an enmity against copying. If you copy what another company does and execute better, that's progress. Amazon.com was just the Sears catalog with a website and faster shipping. But it's sadly ironic that you have this negative view against idea-copying while your own company is dense in a space of competitors that offer online code editing and evaluation – some of which have already exited, as I mentioned above.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  I'll happily contribute to a GoFundMe for the defense. I haven't made it through all of the comments, but I wonder if this isn't a case the EFF would be interested in.
  - brundolf 5y ago
    I think the EFF is mainly interested in cases that are strong enough for a useful precedent to be set by fighting them
- aparsons 5y ago
  Happy to contribute as well, if a GoFundMe / some other crowd fund is set up. OP, if you choose to bring the project back up, please reach out. I know some college professors who may be interested to be your first customers.
dharmaturtle 5y ago
Hey dude. I understand things might be running a bit emotional for everyone right now. You might find it interesting that PG has written tangentially on this topic a few years ago. Might be an interesting take, given the distance in space/time. http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html
- cjv 5y ago
  PG seems to agree with Amjad's decisions. https://imgur.com/a/WkpHk0n https://imgur.com/a/WkpHk0n
  - rafaelero 5y ago
    Wow. Unbelievable. This whole situation is so depressing. By supporting the CEO, is PG arguing that some employee from Facebook couldn't leave the company and make a better social media? This is such a stupid idea that I am almost believing that maybe I am misunderstanding my opponents. If an ex-employee declared his intent to build a similar product to my company, I would probably feel threatened, but in no way I would make any move to avoid that, otherwise I could be correctly labeled as a selfish loser. It's society that will ultimately lose if such an enterprise is faced with legal adversaries. The correct response is to continue building a better product. Fuck non-competitive agreements. People should be free to pursue their passion and what they enjoy doing.
  - reducesuffering 5y ago
    What has happened to YC? Multiple recent companies are making the rounds with clear unethical behavior: Repl.it, TripleByte, Lambda School. A founder seems to be unreasonably kicked from bookface. Meanwhile PG and friends show support for these actions while waxing on about how they are extremely particular about the moral compass of founders.
    - dharmaturtle 5y ago
      Eh. I don't really expect every single YC company to be a bastion of moral integrity. Startups/hackers trying to disrupt industry are gonna do unconventional shit, and that might be more morally grey than usual. Also, given that YC has _thousands_ of alumni... of course there are going to be a few bad apples. The interview is literally 10 minutes long - its not like they're doing a deep character check on founders. All that said, Dark and Prolific being kicked out of YC yet PG apparently supporting Replit is... making me wonder why the fuck PG wrote those articles.
rurabe 5y ago
with regard to ethics, two plausibly valid options: either you believe that people should act ethically even if that means forgoing actions that they are legally allowed to make. if you believe that, isn't it wrong to build a free, open source competitor using all the knowledge you just got from working inside a company? or: you believe that business is the law of the jungle, and everyone is free to do whatever they can get away with legally. in which case why is it a problem for amasad to get lawyers involved? it seems this dude's victimization relies on holding amasad to a higher standard of ethics than he holds himself. maybe he should because he has more money and power. or maybe not?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- burnished 5y ago
  sorry, at what point do we have to watch this guy bully an ex intern and be OK with it? your example does not make sense and frankly you should probably not structure arguments in this way. its good for making people feel like they are wrong, its not good for convincing anyone you are right.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
Instead of blaming the readers, Why not just explain the legal merits of your accusation on Radon? >"Replit version had the same run button placement tho". Seriously? Is this something to be expected from someone who claims to be an open-source evangelist? It seems like as soon as you received the email from Radon on his project, You sent it to your lawyers and asked them for few pointers to threaten this kid to take down a 'potential' competitor. Besides, The funding related statements in your threat clearly motivates the reader to consider that you really don't have anything of legal merit to blame Radon of copying Replit. P.S. We had a small exchange earlier last month[1] regarding your new cryptocurrency fund for small projects/startups, Which I eventually added to my curated list of startup tools after informing you. I'm removing that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135573
acituan 5y ago
> Now, a lot of people implicitly assume that in a dispute between for-profit company and an open-source project, the for-profit company must be in the wrong. All things equal, this is not a baseless assumption; not only profit maximization vs. altruistic sharing are drastically different objective functions; a funded for-profit usually has more agency, including agency to play foul. This is not a crowd that is startup naive, people are familiar with the range of stuff that happens. That said, you've explicitly intimidated the guy with the depth of your funding, then attacked their character despite the fact that you had tried to recruit him, so we are not even operating on assumptions here. Now you'll have to waste some of that funding on PR consultation and damage control. A lose-lose for everyone.
inopinatus 5y ago
Ugh. This is corporate authoritarianism at its most shameless. Companies do not own someone’s expertise. This includes domain knowledge obtained in the course of their employment. If you wish to reserve the right to exploit an invention, patent it. For everything else, I refer you to Intel vs NEC over the cloning of the 8086 (spoiler: Intel lost).
sam0x17 5y ago
> I started working on Replit (or repl.it) back when I was a student in Jordan How would you have felt, and where would you be today if Codeacademy had threatened to sue you instead of being nurturing to your project? The "repl" part of Replit is open source. Your argument ends there. You can't take it back. I could literally fork your repo and I'd be "copying" you by your logic.
newbie789 5y ago
Fascinating! What flaws that existed in the architecture of Replit that existed in 2019 and persist to this day are still considered to be trade secrets worth pursuing legal remedies to keep secret? I understand that you may not be able to describe the invisible long-term proprietary flaws for a number of possible reasons, but can you ballpark the number of these critical flaws that are the unique IP of replit? Or at least the relevant number of times when the code in this recent open source software overlapped with years-old mistakes in the Replit code base that are so crucial that they must be protected?
- truncate 5y ago
  I'd add that its not uncommon to see same flaws that you'd naturally add when working on similar kind of product So just saying it has the same flaws as my product by no means implies anything. Very well may mean that the other person didn't notice it or de-prioritized it, just like you when you started the project (which is why the flaw exists in my product at first place).
equilibrium 5y ago
Would you also like to share with the YC community that you were not alone in working on the idea of Replit while you were in Jordan. You might want to give Max some credit mate. Give credit where credit is due. Good luck with your endeavors. Max Shawabkeh was one of the first engineers working on Repl.it and is hardly given any credit This is a talk he gave back in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfxH-JDF7Xk&t=81s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfxH-JDF7Xk&t=81s https://replit.com/talk/ask/Who-is-Max-Shawabkeh/26386 https://replit.com/talk/ask/Who-is-Max-Shawabkeh/26386 Utterly appalling. It was only a matter of time when all this would catch up with you.
onion2k 5y ago
there is some line that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product I wonder how many YC startups came about from employees of a company failing to get buy-in from their employer about a better way to solve a problem and leaving to start their own company to do it. Many of those will surely have copied large aspects of their former employers' products, including the flaws.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
burnished 5y ago
sorry, do you seriously expect a student who trained at your company to not program the way you do? what do you think they are there for?
wwweston 5y ago
> it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product (if you don't believe that, you can stop reading now, because no argument will convince you) I've upvoted your comment for the value of your perspective and information about your own history with replit predating CodeAcademy, and I appreciate that lots of us feel protective of our ideas and the capacity to benefit from the work we put into executing on them. But... "no argument will convince you?" While it's sometimes true that people hold positions they didn't reason themselves into and can't be reasoned out of, I've found "no argument will convince you" is often indicative of the fact that the speaker considers their position a prima facie reality, which is another way of saying they didn't reason themselves into it either, and therefore may also be underappreciating the merits of a countercase. Or, perhaps as common, they've abandoned the merits altogether and are attempting to narrate themselves or an audience through a lowering of status of those who disagree. There are real questions about what a knowledge worker has a right to take with them after they leave, and you'd probably find lots of people are amenable to the idea that an employer has some legitimate claims. If it's true that this project "copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws" then maybe that might even persuade people if those don't look like natural decisions for the domain, appear to involve some novel problem solving, and/or weren't made public. But the person on the other side of the argument: (a) clearly didn't think they were doing anything they needed to hide from you (b) has already outlined why they thought all their technical decisions were either not unique or influenced by things you'd made public when you made it clear you felt badly treated (c) sure seemed to be making shows of good faith vs being met with threats of using capital to fund an aggressive legal response. Those might be the reasons why many here are taking a critical posture (vs, say, reflexively siding with an open source project). You may find you don't care if you can persuade those who disagree you. Sometimes that's a wise course. You may even exercise the privilege to take this to litigation. But if you really feel your opposition is in the wrong here and want to make a winning case either socially or legally then you're probably going to have to engage some of those points on a more compelling basis.
forgotpwd16 5y ago
Fwiw this won't have happened (a similarly? designed copycat) if Replit's infrastructure was open source. A good example of this model is how GitLab still succeeds even if it is open source that other people are free to host.

by amasad 5y ago

zxzax 5y ago

Hi Amjad, thanks for taking the time to respond. Can you please talk to Radon and work with him to remove the offending "unique and invisible" aspects, to make it so he can put his project back up? There must be some way to make it so that these projects can co-exist without causing any trouble, and it can probably done in a way that is much cheaper than bringing a lawsuit.

amasad 5y ago
Done.

soneca 5y ago

If the author was maliciously crossing the ethical line, why they would show the project privately to you? If the author was not maliciously crossing the ethical line, why were you so quick to threaten legal action and bully them by mentioning that you had the money to make it dangerous for them?

andrewchambers 5y ago
They might if they were seeking approval to show as later evidence.
- hitekker 5y ago
  The phrase that comes to mind is "Xanatos Gambit" https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/XanatosGambit

kyawzazaw 5y ago

Do you feel the same about Zoom's CEO and Jet.com's CEO?

jevgeni 5y ago
Probably not, since they have more money and can’t be outlawyered like an intern could.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
  This is what it boils down to, isn't it? No one bats an eye when an employee of some large company switches to another competitor of noticeable size. But a single person is obviously easy to stomp into submission, and in this case it appears to have happened out of pettiness, a suspicion that is really brought home by the quick threats and the weird "work for us...no wait you were a bad co-worker anyway!" bait and switch.
  - jevgeni 5y ago
    Yes! It boils down to "I can pay money, so that you would need to pay money, and since I have more money, you'll go bankrupt quicker." I'm not all too sure about American laws, but in Europe Amjad's argumentation, especially about "design decisions" is very weak. So it seems, that it's not about even having a stronger legal case. Just the ability to throw money at the problem.

whoisjuan 5y ago

Could you explain roughly what was the biggest tell that he copied Replit's architecture patterns? No need to go into details, but perhaps this would make your side of the story more clear. So far we only have seen Radon's post and emails screenshots. He seems to be very adamant about not copying any of Replit's IP. But clearly every story has two sides and I think it's very important to hear yours. Hopefully it will come in the form of a blog post or similar. Genuinely curious and not taking sides with anyone here. I just believe that the OSS community can learn from this.

truetraveller 5y ago
Copied or not, if he signed a non-compete, he is violating the agreement. His project absolutely competes with Replit. Do you agree with this?
- thebradbain 5y ago
  Noncompetes are illegal and unenforceable in California, where Repl.it is incorporated. So if he signed a noncompete, it would actually be Repl.it that is in the wrong here, not him.
  - gip 5y ago
    I am not sure they are 'illegal' - do you have a source for this? That being said, most non-competes are not enfoceable in Californina that's true. And that is a very good thing imo and a net positive for innovation.
    - jcrites 5y ago
      According to the California Business and Professions Code Section 16600, “every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.” https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=BPC&sectionNum=16600 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio.... This does not make contracts containing such clauses "illegal", but rather unenforceable in court. The student could sign a contract saying "I will not work on a company that competes with Repl.it", and he did, and the company tried to sue him over it with that as the only claim, then the court would quickly grant a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

nonbirithm 5y ago

> there is some line that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product Depending on the severity of the offense and the circumstances this would make sense, but this was just a small project, not an entire VC-backed service. Would you be willing to provide concrete evidence to show that the intern was actually copying the specifics of your product? As it stands many of us are not convinced that this is the case. What are these "unique, invisible aspects" of Replit that you are referring to which are so integral to merit legal action from you? And do you believe it was justified against a project that was never even intended to be anything more than a hobbyist activity?

NmAmDa 5y ago

So your proof that he copied a source code in the project is you saying that “if you are not convinced by my accusation which I didn’t prove, then stop reading because nothing will convince you”. have you missed logic class? no one told you before that the burden of proof is on the accuser?

mindcrime 5y ago

It copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws. That's the hallmark of copying versus merely writing one's own program to solve the same problem. Or the hallmark of having experience working in a particular domain, and simply favoring techniques and approaches that are familiar. Is there any particular reason why anybody should believe that any of these "unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture" constitute any kind of genuine "intellectual property" in either a legal OR moral sense?? I mean, if you're arguing that he literally copied copyrighted code, then sure, OK, maybe you have something. But nebulous appeals to "design decisions?" Don't expect many people to have sympathy for that. At some point you're treading into "anybody who ever worked for a company making cars can never work for another car company" or "A guy who makes a new chair owes money to everyone who ever built a chair" territory.

mmastrac 5y ago
What's interesting is that the redacted full thread alludes to some of these invisible aspects, and Radon appears to have a justification for doing things that way (though it's all blacked out so we cannot evaluate the merits of that argument). https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2 https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2 https://github.com/replit/upm https://github.com/replit/upm is likely one of the blacked-out bits in that email, as Radon says he wrote the README.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  I find it telling that Radon wrote out an extensive explanation of why he believes his project is not based on replit, and Amjad basically responds with "you're wrong, you copied it" without addressing anything Radon said.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    To be fair, there’s only a few ways to say that the correct solution seems obvious in hindsight. I agree with Amjad there. I just don’t think that working with something means you can never use those patterns again. That’s ridiculous. If I couldn’t use any of the patterns that I learned about in previous jobs I would still be programming as if I had 1 year of university experience.

tw04 5y ago

>It copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws. And yet you haven’t managed to tell anyone what these “invisible” aspects are. So it kind of just sounds like you’re making things up.

truetraveller 5y ago
What right does the public have to know this? None. It's their secret sauce, it's reasonable they don't want to publicize it. Obviously, Radon has every right to know. But not us.
- Elidrake24 5y ago
  They made claims and threatened legal action; certainly the public doesn’t need to legally know until a lawsuit is actually brought, but they would be required to present such evidence to the public in court. Do they have to currently? No, of course not. But this isn’t someone claiming that another did something behind closed doors to bait public disclosure. They opened this door by making the claims, from a standpoint of whether one might want to do business with replit in the future it’s entirely reasonable to ask for proof of what otherwise are slanderous claims.
  - otterley 5y ago
    You don’t have to reveal your trade secrets in open court. They can be shown to the judge “in camera” and redacted from public filings. If all you had to do to get a company to reveal all its secrets were to sue it on some plausible legal theory and conduct discovery, everyone would do it.
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      >You don’t have to reveal your trade secrets in open court well excellent that we're not in a court here on HN or Twitter then. If he decides to intimidate someone without putting any concrete evidence up for it we're well within our rights to drag him over the coals for it. Dogs that bark don't bite, if he wanted to avoid this he should have gone to his lawyers directly, instead he's already issuing half-baked apologies in this very thread. Which means he has zilch and just wanted to bully a recent graduate into taking his product off the internet.

rizpanjwani 5y ago

this is disappointing behaviour. are there any alternatives to repl.it one can recommend? I don't want to use it anymore.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
acmj 5y ago
There is https://ideone.com https://ideone.com. I compared several similar services last year, including repl.it of course. I liked ideone better for some reason I forgot. PS: I have just checked repl.it again. Its UI has been changed a lot and it seems to require signup now, which makes me even less likely to use it.
Aeolun 5y ago
I hear there’s this project called Ruji that has more than 200 languages. Unfortunately it seems to be taken down.
indigodaddy 5y ago
codesandbox.io is quite good too

ahmedalsudani 5y ago

repl.it has been a project I've admired and recommended for a long time. The same can be said for many members of this community. A few reasons why there's so much anger, in my estimation: - When you support a project, you want its leaders to embody decent values. - You have always projected an image of someone who's "nice" and doing things right. You cannot bully your intern in private and keep that image. - Most importantly, you are now in the Goliath position and you are acting tyrannically. It's hard to side with someone going "I have raised $20M and I will use it to crush you" to their previous intern. The fact that you did not explain your concerns, jumped straight to legal threats, and did not want to talk after the project was taken down looks quite bad. If you had approached it in a more diplomatic fashion, you would not be public enemy #1 on HN. Understand the position you're in. You wield a big stick; speak softly. P.S. it's perfectly understandable that you'd have concerns about the project, though IMHO it's an overreaction. That's not the issue. The issue is _how_ you approached it.

truetraveller 5y ago
The anger is exaggerated, and there are still many unknowns. Did he sign a non-compete agreement? If so, the intern would be breaking that agreement. It makes no difference if he raised $20 million or $100 million. There is nothing "tyrannical" about that. I suppose you are a Muslim from your name. The Muslim stays silent when he is unsure. He stays clear of "drama". He thinks the best of other humans, and especially of his Muslim brothers.
amasad 5y ago
Thank you -- this is really good feedback.
- windexh8er 5y ago
  It is great feedback. Feedback that you failed to execute on in a spectacular manner. You've lost my group as customers today. In no way will I knowingly support a founder with such a broken perspective on prior art.
  - 5y ago

jarenmf 5y ago

No one is assuming anything. That's your email there where you bullied the guy. You could have been nice about it but instead you wanted to intimidate him by threatening to sue him. If you wanna make this right I think you should acknowledge that you overreacted and apologize to him.

tomnipotent 5y ago

> a lot of people implicitly assume Considering your existing cred, I'm sure many in the community would give you the benefit of the doubt if addressed the issue head-on and explained what was infringed instead of what reads as emotionally charged responses. And if you're holding out for legal reasons, I imagine that would make the community more outraged because it escalates an accidental bad faith incident into a intentional one.

smusamashah 5y ago

Ideon existed since 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20091214124037/http://ideone.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20091214124037/http://ideone.com...

kabdib 5y ago

There's a big difference between hard-won technology (worthwhile protecting with patents, or trade secret law) and "this is how we designed this iteration of the project." Of course your implementation is secret (because it's closed source). That doesn't make it valuable enough to sue over, unless you want to be in the same camp as the asshats at Oracle / SCO. If you didn't seriously consider obtaining patents for your efforts (and then decide to keep them as trade secrets, for whatever reason) then they're probably not valuable enough to jumpstart lawyers. At the moment, I think you've done a fair amount of damage to your company's reputation. If I were on your board, we would be having some hard conversations right now.

frabjoused 5y ago

I wouldn't recommend attempting a rebuttal when you've just hit the top 30 HN posts of all time. Pretty much your best option is to apologize.

truetraveller 5y ago

Amjad, don't worry about some of the HN crowd putting you down. When a non-compete agreement is signed, it must be honored. Some (not all) of these people are in my opinion, hypocritical and/or jealous and/or just plain evil. They want to see you go down. If you must, issue an "apology" to appease these obnoxious folk. Unfortunately, that's how the world is nowadays.

phonon 5y ago
> When a non-compete agreement is signed, it must be honored. Not correct; it's considered against public policy in California. https://www.employmentrightscalifornia.com/can-my-california-employer-enforce-a-non-compete-agreement/ https://www.employmentrightscalifornia.com/can-my-california... حَدَّثَنَا مُسَدَّدٌ، حَدَّثَنَا يَحْيَى، عَنْ عُبَيْدِ اللَّهِ، قَالَ حَدَّثَنِي نَافِعٌ، عَنِ ابْنِ عُمَرَ ـ رضى الله عنهما ـ عَنِ النَّبِيِّ صلى الله عليه وسلم‏.‏ وَحَدَّثَنِي مُحَمَّدُ بْنُ صَبَّاحٍ، حَدَّثَنَا إِسْمَاعِيلُ بْنُ زَكَرِيَّاءَ، عَنْ عُبَيْدِ اللَّهِ، عَنْ نَافِعٍ، عَنِ ابْنِ عُمَرَ ـ رضى الله عنهما ـ عَنِ النَّبِيِّ صلى الله عليه وسلم قَالَ ‏ "‏ السَّمْعُ وَالطَّاعَةُ حَقٌّ، مَا لَمْ يُؤْمَرْ بِالْمَعْصِيَةِ، فَإِذَا أُمِرَ بِمَعْصِيَةٍ فَلاَ سَمْعَ وَلاَ طَاعَةَ ‏"‏‏.‏
- truetraveller 5y ago
  Okay, that's a good find about California law. But there are exceptions and loop-holes. They probably would not apply here. JazakAllah Khair for the hadeeth. There's another hadeeth: "The Muslims are bound by their conditions". So, what takes precedence: an agreement between two people, or the law of the land? That's a good question, actually!
  - phonon 5y ago
    بَيْعَة‎ لَقَدْ رَضِيَ اللَّهُ عَنِ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ إِذْ يُبَايِعُونَكَ تَحْتَ الشَّجَرَةِ فَعَلِمَ مَا فِي قُلُوبِهِمْ فَأَنزَلَ السَّكِينَةَ عَلَيْهِمْ وَأَثَابَهُمْ فَتْحًا قَرِيبًا
  - mmastrac 5y ago
    The law of the land takes precedence. Contracts can be signed in a situation where there is a power imbalance and courts will often nullify or modify those agreements, despite them being made between two consenting parties.

nradov 5y ago

What is the specific legal accusation that you're making here? Contract violation? Copyright violation? Patent violation? Trade secret theft? Ethical lines are not legally relevant.

morganvachon 5y ago

Edit: and just like that, threatened with legal action over my comment. Just like Radon I don't have the resources to fight a legal battle so I'm deleting my comment.

jcrites 5y ago

California law does not recognize non-compete agreements. Your heardquarters are in San Francisco. Good luck. Unless you have ironclad evidence that he stole intellectual property from your company you don't have a legal case to stand on. I have offered to pay the student's legal fees in exchange for putting the GitHub repository back up, with the provision of reviewing the contracts he signed with you to ensure there is no terms that he could be violating, after review with my own lawyers. I was also considering working for your company when considering changing forms, but I never would after hearing about this episode. Your remarks about "YC shouldn't fund copycats" are especially ironic given that Repl.it is by far not the first company to make programming online easy to do. I was involved in acquisition of Cloud9.io (now AWS Cloud9 IDE – the original site has been taken down from the Wayback Machine but you can see plenty of their work in articles if you search Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=cloud9+io+startup https://www.google.com/search?q=cloud9+io+startup ) – they provided an online IDE, terminal, full Linux environment, and the ability to program in many different programming languages. Personally, I don't have an enmity against copying. If you copy what another company does and execute better, that's progress. Amazon.com was just the Sears catalog with a website and faster shipping. But it's sadly ironic that you have this negative view against idea-copying while your own company is dense in a space of competitors that offer online code editing and evaluation – some of which have already exited, as I mentioned above.

andrew_ 5y ago
I'll happily contribute to a GoFundMe for the defense. I haven't made it through all of the comments, but I wonder if this isn't a case the EFF would be interested in.
- brundolf 5y ago
  I think the EFF is mainly interested in cases that are strong enough for a useful precedent to be set by fighting them
aparsons 5y ago
Happy to contribute as well, if a GoFundMe / some other crowd fund is set up. OP, if you choose to bring the project back up, please reach out. I know some college professors who may be interested to be your first customers.

dharmaturtle 5y ago

Hey dude. I understand things might be running a bit emotional for everyone right now. You might find it interesting that PG has written tangentially on this topic a few years ago. Might be an interesting take, given the distance in space/time. http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html

cjv 5y ago
PG seems to agree with Amjad's decisions. https://imgur.com/a/WkpHk0n https://imgur.com/a/WkpHk0n
- rafaelero 5y ago
  Wow. Unbelievable. This whole situation is so depressing. By supporting the CEO, is PG arguing that some employee from Facebook couldn't leave the company and make a better social media? This is such a stupid idea that I am almost believing that maybe I am misunderstanding my opponents. If an ex-employee declared his intent to build a similar product to my company, I would probably feel threatened, but in no way I would make any move to avoid that, otherwise I could be correctly labeled as a selfish loser. It's society that will ultimately lose if such an enterprise is faced with legal adversaries. The correct response is to continue building a better product. Fuck non-competitive agreements. People should be free to pursue their passion and what they enjoy doing.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  What has happened to YC? Multiple recent companies are making the rounds with clear unethical behavior: Repl.it, TripleByte, Lambda School. A founder seems to be unreasonably kicked from bookface. Meanwhile PG and friends show support for these actions while waxing on about how they are extremely particular about the moral compass of founders.
  - dharmaturtle 5y ago
    Eh. I don't really expect every single YC company to be a bastion of moral integrity. Startups/hackers trying to disrupt industry are gonna do unconventional shit, and that might be more morally grey than usual. Also, given that YC has _thousands_ of alumni... of course there are going to be a few bad apples. The interview is literally 10 minutes long - its not like they're doing a deep character check on founders. All that said, Dark and Prolific being kicked out of YC yet PG apparently supporting Replit is... making me wonder why the fuck PG wrote those articles.

rurabe 5y ago

with regard to ethics, two plausibly valid options: either you believe that people should act ethically even if that means forgoing actions that they are legally allowed to make. if you believe that, isn't it wrong to build a free, open source competitor using all the knowledge you just got from working inside a company? or: you believe that business is the law of the jungle, and everyone is free to do whatever they can get away with legally. in which case why is it a problem for amasad to get lawyers involved? it seems this dude's victimization relies on holding amasad to a higher standard of ethics than he holds himself. maybe he should because he has more money and power. or maybe not?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
burnished 5y ago
sorry, at what point do we have to watch this guy bully an ex intern and be OK with it? your example does not make sense and frankly you should probably not structure arguments in this way. its good for making people feel like they are wrong, its not good for convincing anyone you are right.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

Instead of blaming the readers, Why not just explain the legal merits of your accusation on Radon? >"Replit version had the same run button placement tho". Seriously? Is this something to be expected from someone who claims to be an open-source evangelist? It seems like as soon as you received the email from Radon on his project, You sent it to your lawyers and asked them for few pointers to threaten this kid to take down a 'potential' competitor. Besides, The funding related statements in your threat clearly motivates the reader to consider that you really don't have anything of legal merit to blame Radon of copying Replit. P.S. We had a small exchange earlier last month[1] regarding your new cryptocurrency fund for small projects/startups, Which I eventually added to my curated list of startup tools after informing you. I'm removing that. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135573

acituan 5y ago

> Now, a lot of people implicitly assume that in a dispute between for-profit company and an open-source project, the for-profit company must be in the wrong. All things equal, this is not a baseless assumption; not only profit maximization vs. altruistic sharing are drastically different objective functions; a funded for-profit usually has more agency, including agency to play foul. This is not a crowd that is startup naive, people are familiar with the range of stuff that happens. That said, you've explicitly intimidated the guy with the depth of your funding, then attacked their character despite the fact that you had tried to recruit him, so we are not even operating on assumptions here. Now you'll have to waste some of that funding on PR consultation and damage control. A lose-lose for everyone.

inopinatus 5y ago

Ugh. This is corporate authoritarianism at its most shameless. Companies do not own someone’s expertise. This includes domain knowledge obtained in the course of their employment. If you wish to reserve the right to exploit an invention, patent it. For everything else, I refer you to Intel vs NEC over the cloning of the 8086 (spoiler: Intel lost).

sam0x17 5y ago

> I started working on Replit (or repl.it) back when I was a student in Jordan How would you have felt, and where would you be today if Codeacademy had threatened to sue you instead of being nurturing to your project? The "repl" part of Replit is open source. Your argument ends there. You can't take it back. I could literally fork your repo and I'd be "copying" you by your logic.

newbie789 5y ago

Fascinating! What flaws that existed in the architecture of Replit that existed in 2019 and persist to this day are still considered to be trade secrets worth pursuing legal remedies to keep secret? I understand that you may not be able to describe the invisible long-term proprietary flaws for a number of possible reasons, but can you ballpark the number of these critical flaws that are the unique IP of replit? Or at least the relevant number of times when the code in this recent open source software overlapped with years-old mistakes in the Replit code base that are so crucial that they must be protected?

truncate 5y ago
I'd add that its not uncommon to see same flaws that you'd naturally add when working on similar kind of product So just saying it has the same flaws as my product by no means implies anything. Very well may mean that the other person didn't notice it or de-prioritized it, just like you when you started the project (which is why the flaw exists in my product at first place).

equilibrium 5y ago

Would you also like to share with the YC community that you were not alone in working on the idea of Replit while you were in Jordan. You might want to give Max some credit mate. Give credit where credit is due. Good luck with your endeavors. Max Shawabkeh was one of the first engineers working on Repl.it and is hardly given any credit This is a talk he gave back in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfxH-JDF7Xk&t=81s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfxH-JDF7Xk&t=81s https://replit.com/talk/ask/Who-is-Max-Shawabkeh/26386 https://replit.com/talk/ask/Who-is-Max-Shawabkeh/26386 Utterly appalling. It was only a matter of time when all this would catch up with you.

onion2k 5y ago

there is some line that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product I wonder how many YC startups came about from employees of a company failing to get buy-in from their employer about a better way to solve a problem and leaving to start their own company to do it. Many of those will surely have copied large aspects of their former employers' products, including the flaws.

deleted 5y ago

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burnished 5y ago

sorry, do you seriously expect a student who trained at your company to not program the way you do? what do you think they are there for?

wwweston 5y ago

> it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product (if you don't believe that, you can stop reading now, because no argument will convince you) I've upvoted your comment for the value of your perspective and information about your own history with replit predating CodeAcademy, and I appreciate that lots of us feel protective of our ideas and the capacity to benefit from the work we put into executing on them. But... "no argument will convince you?" While it's sometimes true that people hold positions they didn't reason themselves into and can't be reasoned out of, I've found "no argument will convince you" is often indicative of the fact that the speaker considers their position a prima facie reality, which is another way of saying they didn't reason themselves into it either, and therefore may also be underappreciating the merits of a countercase. Or, perhaps as common, they've abandoned the merits altogether and are attempting to narrate themselves or an audience through a lowering of status of those who disagree. There are real questions about what a knowledge worker has a right to take with them after they leave, and you'd probably find lots of people are amenable to the idea that an employer has some legitimate claims. If it's true that this project "copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws" then maybe that might even persuade people if those don't look like natural decisions for the domain, appear to involve some novel problem solving, and/or weren't made public. But the person on the other side of the argument: (a) clearly didn't think they were doing anything they needed to hide from you (b) has already outlined why they thought all their technical decisions were either not unique or influenced by things you'd made public when you made it clear you felt badly treated (c) sure seemed to be making shows of good faith vs being met with threats of using capital to fund an aggressive legal response. Those might be the reasons why many here are taking a critical posture (vs, say, reflexively siding with an open source project). You may find you don't care if you can persuade those who disagree you. Sometimes that's a wise course. You may even exercise the privilege to take this to litigation. But if you really feel your opposition is in the wrong here and want to make a winning case either socially or legally then you're probably going to have to engage some of those points on a more compelling basis.

forgotpwd16 5y ago

Fwiw this won't have happened (a similarly? designed copycat) if Replit's infrastructure was open source. A good example of this model is how GitLab still succeeds even if it is open source that other people are free to host.