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.

[1] https://lively-kernel.org

[2] https://lively-next.org

[3] https://cloxp.github.io/cloxp-intro.html

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).

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.

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

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.

I'll just leave this here so we can all bask in the insane hypocrisy of this entire episode.

https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca...

Edit: See Amjad's response below – seems Repl.it may have pre-dated this 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?

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?

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.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1401760537390714882

https://replit.com/apps/kaboom

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.. :/

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.

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.

In the very least their poor decision making will now cost them a massive deal, so now there is a positive spin :)

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.

After they added the account requirement and seeing this blog post, I think I'll have to change my opinion about them.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

"We're the most ambitious software startup in history." [1]

My second interaction is this one ...

[1] https://twitter.com/amasad/status/1342891578394882051

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?

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...

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.

But still I'll make an effort to stop using repl.it going forward. What a scumbag move.

> 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

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.

> 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".

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

Unbelievable and shameless.

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.

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.

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.

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?

"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..."

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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

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/ I think they're going to completely destroy all these Replit-like models.

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.

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.

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...

https://github.com/raxod502/python-in-a-box/blob/master/serv...

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!

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15155068

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

It's usually not that difficult to keep work and passion projects clearly separate so that no one could be confused.

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.

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

Somebody needs to flush the toilet and get their shit out of here, it stinks.

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.

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.

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.

Reading those emails from the CEO left a bad taste in mouth.

If Replit CEO had any brains he should have thought about hiring OP as an exceptional engineer and work with them.

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.

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.

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.

https://replit.canny.io/general-feedback/p/how-replit-used-l...

but did you use "internal" knowledge of repl it in order to build it?

Enjoy.

[0]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

"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"

We're at 7. https://github.com/adsharma/py2many/

https://github.com/replit/polygott/

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

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

It's like y'all have never heard of 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?

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!

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.

I say you use this exposure to actually build a Lyft to their Uber. Show them who is really boss.

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.

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.

(I'm not a lawyer, so don't interpret this as anything other than a possibly poorly-informed opinion.)

If (in another world) he made this project with commercial motive and used some of the design decisions, would this actually be illegal?

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!

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.

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

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?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

And for the record, I never liked repl.it because it was usually slow.

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)."

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.

Definitely will not consider it for my team.

Don’t be scared of them. They are scums.

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.

[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)

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.

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...