The email didn&#x27;t say suing. It just said he was going to talk to his lawyers. Just wait for a cease and desist. If someone can replicate you code and maintain it as an OSS project, there is absolutely no way that wouldn&#x27;t be the lawyers first step. I&#x27;m not shaming him cause that&#x27;s still scary, but this is a just another CEO thinking they can do what they want.

The premise of being sued should be enough to scare most people, whether they are right or wrong. As such it&#x27;s not surprising.

Yes, but what would replit gain? Going after such a case would have given them nothing except for some expense.Dragging random people through court without any meaningful expected outcome sure doesn&#x27;t seem like something VC&#x27;s would like to fund. I&#x27;m not a VC though. Do they just rubber stamp whatever bullshit behavior from a CEO?

Defense is a lot more expensive than offense in civil court. Complicated cases like these can be dragged for years and they&#x27;d have to pay for it. Intellectual property laws are very in the favor of whomever has the money to throw lawyers around.

Unless I was sure the EFF or similar organization was ready to take me on pro bono, I&#x27;d do a lot to avoid the Corporate Nuisance Lawsuit Cannon. A fun evening project isn&#x27;t worth years in court and hundreds of thousands spent on legal fees--and Replit knows this.Hopefully by publicizing what happened, he might get an offer for legal defense if necessary, then reinstate the project.

&gt; Litigation is expensive, you could have qualified for a public defender while they burned company assets&gt; I say this as someone who isn&#x27;t a stranger to the courts and judicial system.This wouldn&#x27;t be a criminal case, how are public defenders relevant?For not being a stranger, you seem sort of unfamiliar with the potential downsides of being involved in legal action, the existence of damages&#x2F;remedies, etc.

&gt; you could have qualified for a public defenderIn general, that&#x27;s only for criminal matters. At least, that&#x27;s what the Sixth Amendment&#x27;s right to counsel pertains to.That said, sometimes public defenders are appointed in certain limited non-criminal proceedings, but a case about intellectual property is not one where you&#x27;d qualify for a public defender.

&gt; Why did you take it down? And why did you apologize?I think taking it down (temporary at first) is prudent in that situation, but I agree about the apology. Don’t apologize unless you agree you have done something wrong.

&gt;&gt; I say this as someone who isn&#x27;t a stranger to the courts and judicial system.I question this is you are saying that welcoming a lawsuit is a good idea for a side project. That could be years of expensive headaches for literately zero gain other than being able to say I get to keep my side project up.

&gt; Why did you take it down? And why did you apologize?Probably because he actually did do something that, if not explicitly wrong&#x2F;illegal, then at the very least on the borderline of being so.And he has very little to gain by fighting this. He got his clicks and likes already. What would he need to website for?

Why did you take it down? And why did you apologize?I think the threat to sue was posturing, the same way that legal charges are always trumped up to get you to accept a plea.If you had let them see it through, and they intended to sue you, you could have churned up a horror-inducing PR nightmare of a shitstorm for them.If someone is really as petty to light cash on fire suing a young person with no assets over baseless claims, let them do it.Litigation is expensive, you could have qualified for a public defender while they burned company assets, or just have represented yourself.I say this as someone who isn&#x27;t a stranger to the courts and judicial system.

Or it may simply reflect the personal style and values of the CEO Amjad Masad notwithstanding their company position.

100% agree. If this threatened them, it means they are not doing well.

That&#x27;s part of why someone is a threat to your moat. You don&#x27;t assume that a good rival effort will go unnoticed by investors and customers.

Clearly their investors should have funded the intern!

I would play devil&#x27;s advocate here and say that the situation is probably muddier than it is presented in the blog. Also there appers to be a level of trust here (at least the Replit CEO trusted that OP will not make this go viral on HN and spiral into a PR nightmare I suppose, which though is the most entertaining path it can take)Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.

Reading this part really made my head shake. Attacking a former intern like that, why would anyone want to intern there after this?

They offered to hire him before insinuating he was a bad&#x2F;demanding intern, as well. This is standard manipulative behavior and has little benefit to anyone besides attempting to make the intern feel bad. This isn&#x27;t the first time I&#x27;ve seen a founder resort to this exact type of behavior before threatening legal action.

He blocked me on Twitter for pointing out something (technical) he said was wrong, and then he deleted his tweet. Told me everything I need to know about that guy.

I feel great that others see how ridiculous Amjad is… Replit is cool but has a serious attitude.

Yeah - I don&#x27;t really like piling on, but Replit and Roam both give off massive alarms for me regarding the founders.Both seem to think they&#x27;re Xerox PARC - or the most ambitious software companies on earth, both products seem pretty underwhelming.Just seems wildly disproportionate to what they&#x27;re doing. At least Steve Jobs was actually building stuff that was revolutionary. Elon Musk is building reusable rockets and pulling EVs from the future to modern day. Roam is making another centralized document editor?In terms of software ambition neither of them come close to Urbit in what they&#x27;re trying to accomplish, and Galen is not an ass about it.

I unfollowed him after he tweeted that Repl.it is the most innovative company in the world.Yeah, not SpaceX or Neuralink or Pfizer. A company that runs docker images is the most innovative company.

It&#x27;s crazy how a little bit of money can turn people into jerks.

Well the product is obvious and easy to replicate without specialised knowledge. CEO likely realises this as much as everyone else so feels the need to overcompensate with personal marketing (and apparently now lawyers).

It&#x27;s kinda funny how their CEO writes on Twitter all the time that they are the best company in the world, with the best product, do most innovations in tech etc and 10 minutes later he is threatened by a small open-source project that wasn&#x27;t even created to compete.

I would love to know how YC does their DD because it seems like it’s the most shallow and uninformed, meme-driven process.

Why would funding by YC in any way suggest that a startup might not do that?

They were funded by YCombinator.  Should we expect other YC companies to go after open source projects?

&gt; VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn&#x27;t be surprising when people try very hard to protect that investment to help them get a better return.Yeah, but if the investment is threatened by a weekend project built in a few days, it means that a serious competitor could destroy it in a couple weeks.The thought that came to mind about this was a baker stepping on ants outside his store because nobody was coming into the store. If nobody wants to come into the store because of ants crawling in front, your store has larger issues.

It doesn&#x27;t have to be surprising to be entertaining!

Out of curiosity, how hard is &quot;very hard&quot;?

&quot;People try very hard to protect that investment and that&#x27;s why gangsters tracked down where you live and broke your legs&quot;If someone is invested and stands to loose money, it does not gice them a free pass to act immorally.

VC funded companies aren&#x27;t some tech billionaire funding a cool new project.VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn&#x27;t be surprising when people try very hard to protect that investment to help them get a better return.

Also, there is no moat. As far as I know, there are no major protected intellectual properties, technical or business learning curves, regulatory hurdles, intensive capitalization requirements, economies of scale... I suppose there may be some amount of network effect, but not so much that it&#x27;s hard to imagine a competitor struggling to overcome it.

The CEO is actually worried that this weekend project will make it hard for replit to raise fundings from investors because it makes it look like there is no moat to hosting hundreds of programming languages. The investors don&#x27;t know that the code here doesn&#x27;t scale.

&gt; Agreed... but the intern is obviously incredibly naive in thinking that repl.it would be happy to see one of their ex-interns working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they&#x27;re doing.. whether or not this is a threat to them right now. There&#x27;s a tiny, but non-zero chance, that this project could become successful and who knows, take marketshare from repl.it...Too bad, that&#x27;s business and how a functioning free market works. If it&#x27;s that important to Replit, then they should patent it. If they can&#x27;t get a patent then, again, too bad.

Of course he&#x27;s naive. He&#x27;s just out of college, would you have been more savvy at that age?

So once I&#x27;ve done one kind of work I shouldn&#x27;t ever do that again for fear of offending my previous employer? Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds?

I&#x27;m sorry but this is a lot of words to say &quot;be subservient to your old boss&quot;. There&#x27;s nothing wrong in what this dude did. He made an open source experiment and for that he was threatened practically at gun point. The contents of the emails he received are highly unprofessional and childishly antagonistic

It&#x27;s pretty much understood that your institutional knowledge will go for a walk in this industry. Taking it personally is more unprofessional than what the intern did.&gt; it is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least &quot;stealing the idea&quot;?? Just don&#x27;t do that.Ideas aren&#x27;t worth the paper they&#x27;re written on, and a startup founder should know that better than anyone else. Hell, wasn&#x27;t Fairchild &quot;the same idea&quot; as Shockley Semi?I have a lot of respect for what repl.it is and their vision, and the intern did not come close to copying it. But I did lose a bit of respect for the current leadership if this is how they respond to toy reimplementations of certain features.

&gt; basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out thereWith this reasoning anyone at Amazon cannot join another ecommerce, or anyone at Microsoft OS cannot join Apple, or anyone in iPhone team cannot join Android.If you are worried that your product is at the mercy of people not talking about it, or experimenting with the knowledge in future, then thats the least of your worries. The product, the team and the company is in a deep mess.

&gt; how is that not at least &quot;stealing the idea&quot;??Because Replit didn&#x27;t originate the idea of &quot;web site you can execute code on&quot;. There&#x27;s no idea to be stolen here, or if there was stealing, it&#x27;s not from Replit.

What an odd take.There was respect shown.Replit is not that innovative or the pioneer of this idea - many have done this so many times beforeWit this silly logic, nobody can ever work for a compeitor.Was Zoom&#x27;s CEO unprofessional for starting Zoom after working so long in WebEx? How about Jet.com founder after working at Amazon?

I think this is a bad a take. How many different positive ways was there to approach this situation? The response from the CEO was incredibly unprofessional and seemed unnecessarily antagonistic to the point of provocation.

&gt;Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of people to work on some product, you teach them &quot;secrets of the trade&quot;, send them to conferences, let them participate in making decisions, giving them extraordinary insight in the area of work you are active on... and as soon as they leave your company, they use all that knowledge to try to create something with that on their own (I can understand it, once you konw stuff and enjoy it, you want to keep working on it even in your own time), just for fun... basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.Two things, first: You write like the company did the teaching, sending to conferences, allowing to participate ... out of the goodness of their heart. Obviously they did this because they saw a value in this, in fact they even pay their employees money to do these things.Moreover, what do you think happens when people leave companies, they never use the knowledge they acquired? Do the companies continue to own that knowledge? Moreover, it even happens all the time employee leave and even found direct competitors to their previous employees. Just look at the founding history of Intel for a famous example. Also by the same measures we could accuse the repl.it CEO of stealing ideas from codeacademy and facebook where he worked previously, I mean he build an interactive website.

If what the ex-intern did can be summarized as slapping an eval() around a form submission and that would somehow threaten your business model then your product is intellectually void and garbage.

&gt; If he had at least come up with something original based on that knowledgeRepl.it itself is completely unoriginal... there&#x27;s been websites doing this stuff for decades now. Of course, the CEO has to live in denial of this, and is easily threatened&#x2F;offended when confronted by this reality.

&quot;, is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least &quot;stealing the idea&quot;??&quot;Vague general ideas like &quot;a car&quot; or &quot;140 character limit&quot; are not property, and so cannot be stolen.Acting this way is superbly entitled.

A huge number of companies including YC companies are built by Ex Amazon and ex Google employees cloning corporate tech.

OP had anticipated your complaints in his post, and pre-replied to them. For example:Replit makes a webapp you can use to run code online in different programming languages. This is nothing new (just Google “run python online” for proof), so Replit’s value proposition is extra features like sharing your work, installing third-party packages, and hosting webapps....Now, none of the ideas I used in my open-source project were “internal design decisions”: they’ve all been published publicly on Replit’s blog (I knew this because I’d been asked to write some of those blog posts during my internship). And my project also wasn’t any more of a Replit clone than any of the other websites on the first few pages of Google results for “run python online”, most of which look exactly the same.You may disagree with these claims, but the general &#x2F; hypothetical stance of your post does not give me any reason to think OP is blowing smoke up our collective asses.For that matter, the CEO of Replit could be more specific about what OP&#x27;s &#x27;crime&#x27; is, though I suspect the worst of it is that OP&#x27;s actions revealed how threadbare the Emperor&#x27;s clothes are.

If they were that valuable why would you ever let them leave?You can&#x27;t end the employment agreement and still expect others to act like they work for you. Every ex-employee is a business person on the same level as you. If they see an opportunity and beat you, you were a fool for letting them go.

&gt; working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they&#x27;re doingRadon outlined why this isn&#x27;t true. [1]&gt; basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.It appears as if you&#x27;re advocating that Radon should&#x27;ve treated the open-source code as if it was closed? [1]&gt; This is incredibly unprofessionalIn what world is it unprofessional to work on a personal side project that has ZERO commercial interests and is using 100% public open-source code? This is actually one of the most professional online disagreements I&#x27;ve ever seen..&gt; Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several yearshUHH ???[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;intuitiveexplanations.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;replit&#x2F;evidence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;intuitiveexplanations.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;replit&#x2F;evidence</a>

Agreed... but the intern is obviously incredibly naive in thinking that repl.it would be happy to see one of their ex-interns working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they&#x27;re doing... whether or not this is a threat to them right now. There&#x27;s a tiny, but non-zero chance, that this project could become successful and who knows, take marketshare from repl.it... and while everyone is pretending they would never be afraid of an intern stealing their business, I doubt many of them saying that have been through this experience and know how it feels like running a business and trying to stay on top of all the scams and bullshit that will get in your way, including from previous &quot;allies&quot; like ex-employees who think can do better.Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of people to work on some product, you teach them &quot;secrets of the trade&quot;, send them to conferences, let them participate in making decisions, giving them extraordinary insight in the area of work you are active on... and as soon as they leave your company, they use all that knowledge to try to create something with that on their own (I can understand it, once you konw stuff and enjoy it, you want to keep working on it even in your own time), just for fun... basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.This is incredibly unprofessional. If he had at least come up with something original based on that knowledge , I would be totally on his side, but his stuff, while it may not be an exact copy of repl.it, is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least &quot;stealing the idea&quot;?? Just don&#x27;t do that.Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years to get an idea out to the world and make it work for others as good as they can... if you want to use your knowledge, just contribute back to the project if it&#x27;s open-source (your contribution will be a lot more useful, very likely, to other people than your poor, basic little project)! If you actually want to compete, which the author claims was not at all his goal (yeah, right, until someone shows even a trace of interest in paying something for it), then by all means go ahead and act reckless, but you&#x27;ll need to come up with some pretty major advantage to have any chance, and will be taking pretty huge risks with lawsuits, but that&#x27;s business as usual in the corporate world.

How long would it take an intern to replicate Twitter? Is Twitter worth millions? I think so.I think it&#x27;s really easy for tech teams to do things in a sub-optimal way and then get all caught up in fixing problems of their own making and start to think they&#x27;re doing really great technical work and that it is a competitive advantage for the company. More companies need to face the fact that their software can be easily replicated and that the value lies elsewhere, such as brand, reputation, reliability, good customer service, etc -- other things that an intern can&#x27;t replicate in a weekend.

Gosh, I wish I received 20 million in funding for that idea that needed three days to be technically replicated by an intern.My wish: Replit should sue intern, intern should get free attorney from EFF, case should be dismissed as &quot;WTF&quot; in court. Future CEOs will know that &quot;an intern would need three days to technically replicate&quot; is not a differentiator. Also, hope is not a strategy. VCs would learn that hearing BS from CEO is not &quot;due diligence&quot;.Intern would eventually be showered in money for speaking to further CEOs about that one mistake they should never do.The world would move on and be a better place for everyone, except unprepared CEOs.

The whole startup space is disgusting. There are a bunch of lucky founders &#x27;chosen ones&#x27; who get a ton of VC funding; as soon as they accept VC funding, users &#x27;magically&#x27; start pouring in (cabal&#x2F;manipulation?), which attracts more funding... Then some megacorp acquires the startup for millions of dollars. Easy peasy.Then these lucky, spoiled-rotten assholes think they&#x27;re entitled to sue anyone who tries to compete with them. Everyone knows this is not a free market. Just a bunch of artificially selected spoiled brats with rich daddies&#x2F;friends enriching themselves by destroying society.

They cannot as it was already published (by... them)

If you can maybe they would have done it already. But they haven&#x27;t so we can all use it.

I wouldn&#x27;t underestimate the potential of that project.I know of other cases where well funded CEOs have tried bullying away someone who recently worked for them from starting a company in a related space. Glad that they weren&#x27;t able to shut it down, and the new founder has raised a nice round. I&#x27;d love to see Radon succeed with his project.IANAL but I don&#x27;t think you can patent &quot;path depencence&quot;. It is sunk cost

Only if you equate sternly worded letters from the CEO with a visit from murderous thugs who steal your stuff.

Sounds like the plot of the movie Antitrust.

I think we should flood the internet with replit clones :) How much money would they want to invest in lawyers?

replitsuperiority would be a good one too.

I think I am going to make Riju clone next weekend, got a name even: Disreplty.

Exactly my thoughts. CEO knows anyone could replicate the project.I even go so far to say that the CEO doesn&#x27;t want his secret to out that he is not that great programmer after all. He just took someone else&#x27;s idea and build a company around it.

I didn’t read it as being scared — more like moral indignation that a member of the team left, then published a clone.Just don’t do that, it’s in poor taste.

My reaction as well. I’ve used Replit lots. It’s great! No offence to Radon, but I would not consider his project a threat to Replit. The best case scenario is it’s a price-sensitive OSS alternative which would naturally have a much much smaller market. Interesting that the CEO was so threatened by this.

A fancy funded company like Replit getting scared by an intern&#x27;s weekend project is entertaining. If your moat is so low it can be replicated in a few days, I think this open source project is the least of their worries.

I used replit few times but now i&#x27;ll remove my account there. srsly what a bullshit they try to do with taking down open source projects cause they feel threaten, pathetic.

Try It Online[0] seems to offer a very similar service - if you don&#x27;t care about the collaboration aspect of it. It claims to be self-hostable[1].glot.io[2] is another, which seems to fit more in the realm of &quot;pastebin with runnable snippets&quot;.As I understand it, a big sell of repl.it is that they have some kind of collaborative editing support, which none of the alternatives I was able to find in a few minutes of digging have. Google Colab has this, but only support Python (AFAIK) and is not open source.0 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tio.run&#x2F;#" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tio.run&#x2F;#</a>1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TryItOnline&#x2F;tiosetup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;TryItOnline&#x2F;tiosetup</a>2 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glot.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glot.io&#x2F;</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;learn&#x2F;collaboration&#x2F;live-share" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;learn&#x2F;collaboration&#x2F;live-share</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;learn&#x2F;develop-cloud&#x2F;overview" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.visualstudio.com&#x2F;learn&#x2F;develop-cloud&#x2F;overview</a>

Are there any open source competitors to Replit that are seeking patrons? I have been encouraged by the rapid fire Show HNs of open source first startups [1], and this space seems ripe for such open tooling.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=pastMonth&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=show%20hn%20open%20source&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=pastMonth&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=fa...</a>

This is a great point- there were a ton of ways that this could have been handled that would have left all parties happy and better off, but the CEO went directly for the lawyer power play.

Yep it&#x27;s a very small step from suing a friendly collaborator to suing a customer.  Ask Oracle.

&gt; litigious and pettyThe unfortunate truth is that this doesn&#x27;t matter. Oracle, as one recent example, is still wildly successful - even in the open source space.

&gt; they&#x27;ve now broadcast to their potential customer base that they&#x27;re litigious and petty.This will indeed the case, and I’ll personally won’t be recommending them anymore. If they’re so petty to threaten to sue some intern, they’re not worth doing business with.

I mean, this was a marketing opportunity. They could&#x27;ve asked nicely if he&#x27;d be willing to link to repl.it for anyone who wants something more solid and scalable. It sounds from the early e-mails as if OP started out very positively predisposed towards them.Instead they&#x27;ve now broadcast to their potential customer base that they&#x27;re litigious and petty.

What boundary do you think they pushed though? I understand the sentiment in general, but I didn&#x27;t get it here at all because I can&#x27;t see anything wrong, bad or questionable that OP did.

The tone here is &quot;uhhh, I did this thing and it turns out it might be bad but I dont think so&quot;. Tbh, the tone he kept here is quite well mannered comparing to the situation at hand.The vibe is more about a person being excited for doing something cool with tech and a company where they interned (not worked, interned!) feeling threatened because it crosses into their domain. If &quot;let’s see what else can I maake with this&quot; is an offense, then to hell I&#x27;ll throw my lightbulbs away.

I agree about the tone, but I think it comes from youthful inexperience and a lack of (legal) knowledge. OP has no idea where the line is, what the lines are, or what professional legal defense would actually require&#x2F;entail. And so they&#x27;re stuck trying to rationalize every possibly-defensible point in the court of public opinion.Also, a good way to get employees that aren&#x27;t testing boundaries is to hire experienced developers rather than interns who are still learning the world.Overall I don&#x27;t see what leg repl.it has to stand on here - their product relies on taking numerous free software packages and bundling them into proprietary software, and yet they have the gall to consider button placement some secret sauce?! But it also depends on what OP&#x27;s employment contract says and when he actually developed this. Altogether, this really just looks like a case of a CEO personally bullying someone else because they can.

I think the CEO is absolutely nuts here.With that said, I also think certain employees though have a very slippery mentality of this sort of vibe where they do things that might be sketchy or on the borderline not OK (but JUST on the line), and then rationalize as &quot;but ... reason!&quot;. The tone of this whole article is very subtly reminiscent of that... the type of person that when given an inch will take 10 inches (not even a mile, not that severe), and always do it under the guise of many bullet points and being nice, like this article... but the undertones are there that they&#x27;re really trying to push the boundary.That&#x27;s my unsolicited .02

Non-compete&#x27;s are not (practically) enforceable in California, where repl.it is located.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.callahan-law.com&#x2F;are-non-competes-enforceable-in-california&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.callahan-law.com&#x2F;are-non-competes-enforceable-in...</a>

Why are you reading and replying to the comments when you haven&#x27;t read the article? You&#x27;ve come at this with a terrible take by inventing a non-existent NDA that would exonerate the CEO. Why bother?

I’d agree with you if this was just a random person, but from this thread (I haven’t read the article) I gather that s&#x2F;he was actually an intern... surely every intern&#x2F;employee would sign some kind of non-compete &#x2F; trade secret &#x2F; intellectual property agreement? In that case, the CEO is completely justified in pursuing to enforce that agreement!Again, it would be different if the CEO threatened a random third party that happened to do a weekend project in the same vertical...

I wonder, people always reference the Streisand Effect, but for every one of those there are a thousand complaints that go quietly heeded.

I mean, making a whole blog post about the situation, and then making the top post of hacker news, just kind of keeps the sniper scope of lawyers pointed at himself.

Amjad the CEO of Replit could be fairly insecure person afraid of losing his company&#x27;s dominance&#x2F;marketshare to some simple intern&#x2F;developer. I am sure he did NOT expect this level of heat.This article and the associated &#x27;press&#x27; could serve as a text-book case for insecure start-up CXOs.

I have met many &quot;CEO&quot;s of a 5 person company so they were CEO by title and not by wright.

Well, I wrote a small comment here on replit, and their CEO actually tracked me down by username on another forum, and sent me a PM there.Nothing harmful, he was just curious about what I liked or didn&#x27;t like about using replit - tbh I found it pretty cool that they&#x27;re so close to the user base. Saw the message weeks afterwards, and forgot the reply him.

If I’m reading those emails correctly, Amjad the CEO directly emailed you occasionally. It is pretty stunning that as the CEO of the company, he would stoop to what I interpret as pretty unprofessional communication and petty threats.I also am failing to connect the dots about why Replit would even feel threatened - if you were as helpful of an intern as described, you’d think they would recognize that you had good intentions only when creating Riju - very odd behavior from Replit all around.

+1Finally someone raising the valid point about &quot;it all depends on the legal paperwork signed.&quot;

What about option 3) here [1] - this email was initiated by Replit&#x27;s CEO - so publishing the original email is...bad?
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;law.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;3980&#x2F;is-it-legal-to-publish-email-that-someone-sent-to-me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;law.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;3980&#x2F;is-it-legal-to-...</a>

&gt; now I guess you&#x27;re gonna get a lawyer threat letter to take down the whole blogpost because you&#x27;ve revealed private conversations without both parties&#x27; consent?Absent any NDA or other contract, there is nothing requiring the other party’s consent to publish correspondence in the US.

Here&#x27;s a glimpse of the other side of the story, a reply from the CEO a few min ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;amasad&#x2F;status&#x2F;1401957368510906369?s=19" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;amasad&#x2F;status&#x2F;1401957368510906369?s=19</a>

Their silence on this matter speaks volumes. I’ve seen the Replit founders comment on just about every other HN post that pops up regarding their company so it’s quite surprising that they’ve made no comment here. Very curious to hear the other side of the story if there is one.

That&#x27;s really shitty. I wonder what the founders of Replit have to say about this? They&#x27;re active on HN so I hope they can address this publicly...EDIT: I mean the screenshots are irrefutable evidence of how bad this has escalated - it started as a normal convo and went downwards like the CEO was out to get some blood for no reason ... now I guess you&#x27;re gonna get a lawyer threat letter to take down the whole blogpost because you&#x27;ve revealed private conversations without both parties&#x27; consent?

I&#x27;m not sure I follow. How is this a Reddit comment?I don&#x27;t think the author of this post is in the right here. Most people are piling on saying Repl.it is behaving irrationally. But to me it seems... in line with what an employer should think?

are you suggesting that publishing evidence against you is a bad idea on reddit but not a bad idea here? Or is your gripe that he said &quot;chief&quot;? That seems like focusing on the wrong thing entirely.

Once you leave? Don&#x27;t really think they can do much as long as you aren&#x27;t using trade secrets.

I don&#x27;t know about what the CEO of repl.it did. It shouldn&#x27;t matter. I only know what the author has chosen to publish on his blog post.He corresponded with his previous employer regarding a free project that competes with them. When he got a negative response he then decided to air his dirty laundry on the Internet.

Is this not what the CEO of repl.it did, moving from codeacademy to repl.it?

Yeah this is what I&#x27;m unsure of as it steps into the legal side of things.In general though, doesn&#x27;t it make sense to not create a free competitor right after leaving your employer? They may have a case regarding stealing trade secrets given that they did give you access to their codebase and daily ops.

Wouldn’t this only hold if you signed a competition clause, and if so then they would have to compensate you for not being able to work on technology X for Y amount of years?

I think the issue was that he was a previous employee. Normally I&#x27;d say &quot;yeah, no problem, make a competitor&quot; but he&#x27;s been exposed to the internal workings of the company.

IANAL, but as someone who has used both tio.run and repl.it, I have difficulty seeing what sort of “competition” this constitutes (Riju, in my eyes, being very very similar to tio).Otherwise I would expect tio to have received some threatening emails as well (maybe they have?).

This person&#x27;s project competes with Repl.it in the same way someone doing Nand2Tetris competes with Intel (a bit exaggerated, but the point is there).

I think that Repl.it can pound sand unless they&#x27;ve got an enforceable non-compete in their intern contract, and that the CEO seems a little unhinged, but it does seem unwise to e-mail them unprompted with this kind of project. Falls under the same general category as &quot;don&#x27;t talk to the cops&quot;.

Yeah, not sure about this one chief. I don&#x27;t know the legal aspects here, but I think it makes sense to not create an open-source project that competes with your previous employer and then correspond with them letting them know you did it...

Kind of a shitty thing to do by that company. So much for embracing open source. And probably they don&#x27;t have a real business case to begin with if they&#x27;re threatened by a former intern&#x27;s open source project. Likely scared they&#x27;ll lose their funding once the investors see how weak they are.

Agreed. I used to use Repli.it all the time if i just wanted to test some Ruby code real quick. Now when I go to the site its asking me to make an account and set up a project and all kinds of nonsense that I don&#x27;t care about

Historically, you didn&#x27;t need an account to use Repl.it. It used to be one of the best sites to go to for this kind of thing.After they added the account requirement and seeing this blog post, I think I&#x27;ll have to change my opinion about them.

Wow... This is really disappointing on Replit&#x27;s part, especially considering the company&#x27;s emphasis on an ideal of developer empowerment &#x2F; creativity &#x2F; collaboration, this seems very excessive.I hope there&#x27;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...

I agree with you but nothing about the comment was discussing whether or not people will pay for repl.itThe context of this HN post is about originality itself.

&gt; Why does it have to be original to be a product people will pay for?No, no; for that it absolutely doesn&#x27;t. People pay for all sorts of goods that are not original, like loaves of bread, pairs of sneakers or T-shirts.It had better be original if you&#x27;re going to harass former interns that they&#x27;re ripping off some intellectual property, and threaten them with lawyers.That&#x27;s all.

Why does it have to be original to be a product people will pay for? There are plenty of unoriginal yet profitable products.What you&#x27;ve said is all true, but most users today don&#x27;t use computers like that. Arguably developers already do if they have SSH access somewhere, but if repl.it brings that experience to a general audience via a web browser then it&#x27;s already valuable.If the Chrome cloud VM idea[1] can raise millions in funding, so can a web timesharing system. ;)[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mightyapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mightyapp.com&#x2F;</a>

I don&#x27;t think there is any fundamentally original idea in replit.It is a time-sharing system where you can log in and use a programming language.We have had those since not long after the dawn of computing.Since at least 1970, we also had smart terminals that allowed the user to fill in a form, and validate it, before sending it to the host.So the time-sharing session being carried out by a protocol between the web front end and back-end is not ipso facto original.Needless to say, neither is the idea of a repl running in a separate process that provides editing, with expressions sent out to a running image for evaluation.

it feels like you&#x27;re intentionally missing the point here. If repl.it is acting as if they believe they have legal leverage, why respond by giving them more leverage?

Yes, poor repl.it who&#x27;s explicitly threatening to use their big bankroll to squash a small developer doing something he is passionate about it. He should just shut up and accept the validity of their effort to silence him.

Aside from maybe the &quot;admit you understood your actions&quot; part, nothing in this blog post provides any additional ammo that the opposing lawyers&#x27; side wouldn&#x27;t have had already.&quot;Private correspondence&quot; and &quot;contact info&quot; are not (in general) legally protected, and the contents of the email thread and the Github repo would be subject to discovery no matter what.

Yeah I don&#x27;t exactly agree with your characterization of this actions but I would be very surprised if he doesnt get legal action taken against him for this post.

I agree. This guy shows a consistent streak of poor decision making and lack of situational awareness. His behavior so far reinforces Amjad&#x27;s claims that he was their most &quot;demanding&quot; intern.

so they said &quot;we&#x27;re gonna talk to some lawyers&quot; and your response is to write a lengthy public blog post without any legal counsel, in which you publish private correspondence along with the other person&#x27;s contact info without their consent, and in which you essentially document all of the evidence against you -and- admit you understood your actions? huh. That&#x27;s probably not how I would have responded.

&gt; They realized you had the potential of taking away some of their traffic.Understandable... but bullying people via email will take away even more traffic from their site (because of bad reputation) if the conversation goes public (as it usually happens).

They realized you had the potential of taking away some of their traffic.Traffic lets them sell data, charm investors, and maybe improve their service to a limited extent by analyzing that data.What do they have to lose by bullying you, since they have lawyers on the payroll already?You could ask a lawyer if you have a chance to win in court.Perhaps the EFF would like to grind their teeth on Replit and create a precedent: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;pages&#x2F;legal-assistance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;pages&#x2F;legal-assistance</a>

Sad that this is my expectation these days. In the past I&#x27;d say I&#x27;d no longer use repl.it but if I ruled out interacting with every company that did unethical stuff I had have to lock myself in an empty room.But still I&#x27;ll make an effort to stop using repl.it going forward. What a scumbag move.

And with that I won&#x27;t be renewing my Replit subscription.

The CEO&#x27;s ego was rejected and now he&#x27;s dumping on this guy.  Seems like a classic NPD response.

That was my first thought.How &#x27;empty&#x27; is Replit as a company if some rando intern is a threat ... and&#x2F;or how poor is the CEO at deciding how to spend his time if this is how they choose to do it?

Yep. At $20m raised, the CEO should be building product, closing customers, building positive press for the company (oops), and recruiting. Time spent on anything else is highly suspect.

I’m also gonna add that, if I invested in a company and the CEO used any fraction of that funding to crush a non-competitor with legal might, I would seriously regret my investment. It seems to me this guy doesn’t understand his own value prop more than a former intern.

Cue article from PG on how founders have to watch out for upstarts by giving them a lashing and issuing legal threats.

I could understand an over eager lawyer but this is the CEO of a company with $20 million in funding personally threatening to sic the lawyers on a one man open source project. This is evidence that: 1) he doesn’t have anything better to do, bad news for Replit, 2) he’s afraid of this little project, also bad news for Replit.

From what I can tell, the CEO has a sore spot for copycats to the point of irrationality. Why I don’t know but he really really hates them in a deep way.

Pretty serious accusation with petty comments from the CEO.Feel like we are missing some crucial part of the story though. Doesn’t make sense why would they go out of their way to threaten a small open-source project.

Atrocious. I&#x27;ve never used replit, and now I never will.

Wow. I was about to apply for an open position at Replit. Not anymore.

I’d say startup culture has changed quite a bit over the past 25 years. It was always highly competitive, of course, but it has IMO lost some of the honor and unspoken rules that it had. Employees are much more likely to be screwed out of any windfall when a liquidity event or IPO occurs, for example, and in fact even junior investors get pushed around too.I honestly don’t know what has caused this change.

There are thousands of startups. Are you generalising some bad actors to characterise an entire segment?

I feel like there&#x27;s been a dramatic shift in sentiment since I started reading HN in 2010&#x2F;2011 or so.Having lived and worked through the last startup boom, it&#x27;s easy to see why. Startups as a force in our economy and our culture were (once again) new and interesting and untested and exciting. You could make an app and be an &quot;instant&quot; millionaire! Money was flowing freely - the Bay Area office-warming parties from newly-minted Series A startups were a sight to behold.Of course we (I) saw it all with rose-colored glasses; reality is always more complicated. Years have passed, and the plucky upstarts have become capitalist overlords. Many vested interests have worked hard over time to establish an alternate narrative where tech is ominous, unaccountable, and used for political ill. People are people and do shitty things, even at startups.It&#x27;s all just people and always has been, but for a time it really did feel special. Maybe I&#x27;m just old.

Maybe I was just naïve but when I first started reading HN there was a lot of optimism around startups, maybe it&#x27;s just the scales falling from our eyes, but it just seems to be one shitty deed after another - maybe the ecosystem was always poisonous ?

Wow, I&#x27;ll go ahead and move them from the list of companies I was excited to see succeed to companies I will avoid forever.

Where did you get the &quot;refused a bunch of offers&quot; bit from; did I miss that, or...?

I interpreted the CEO&#x27;s reactions less as scared and more as angry. The guy interned at their company, refused a bunch of offers, then released an open source project that at first glance mimics their own company.It seemed more like an emotional reflex by the CEO than a calculating ploy to suppress competition. Still doesn&#x27;t bode well though.

Assuming this is what happened.. why would you even worry about your intern doing a project. I don&#x27;t know how long repl.it has existed (from my memory, a while) but are they that scared of something like this catching up to them and beating them in the marketplace? A product the author seemed to have no intention of releasing for commercial use anyways?Also isn&#x27;t the entire point of an internship to learn from a company they&#x27;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&#x27;s worth the hit in reputation.

Not that it presumably applies here, but IIUC they&#x27;re also enforceable if you&#x27;re basically paying the former employee (most of?) their salary for the duration of the agreement.

Seems like both Radon and Repl.it are based in California. If that is correct, then non-compete agreements are only enforceable for founders&#x2F;partners in a business.

The only question that matters is &quot;Did you sign something saying you agreed not to name something like this when you interned for Repl.it, and is it enforceable in your jurisdiction?&quot;I think this makes Amjad look a bit like an ass, but I don&#x27;t know him personally or your relationship with him or repl.it

To add some more info: I don’t want&#x2F;need a file system, and I don’t care about building a web app -- rendering HTML, hosting the code in the cloud, etc., etc. -- I just want a simple console repl (what repl.it started as.)

I&#x27;m also a big fan of early repl.it. I used to be able to hit a bookmarked url and get a repl right away. But its been getting slower and slower and more complicated lately, and this whole situation left a bad taste in my mouth, and it&#x27;s probably the push I need to move to an alternative.In case anybody is thinking of building -- I&#x27;d happily pay for a similar app that let&#x27;s you write&#x2F;share private repls, with third-party package support (yarn, pip, nuget, maven, etc.)

No offense, but I found the early replit so cool, I will replicate it as a weekend project soon.

I guess the cynical answer would be: because there is so much VC money out there, you can probably get funding for just about anything.I&#x27;m off to work on a pitch deck for coding bootcamps for cats.

&gt; 6m usersIs the plan to lose money on each user until they reach profitability? How do they plan to make money?

6m users¹? Smooth and sharable UX? Effective abstractions over many parts of the DevOps stack?This comment has quite the Dropbox &#x27;build such a system yourself quite trivially&#x27; comment energy¹ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;amasad&#x2F;status&#x2F;1394002500508807168" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;amasad&#x2F;status&#x2F;1394002500508807168</a>

How did Replit manage to raise $20m for something as trivial as &quot;a webapp you can use to run code online in different programming languages&quot;?  I assume that it&#x27;s something a bit more than that?

Since Amjad has so much to say about ethics, quick pulse-check, lets rank these in terms of their ethical foundations: building a love-letter open-source hobbyist alternative to a large application; shutting down this alternative with potentially unfounded legal threats; making millions of dollars standing on the shoulders of giants by effectively repackaging and selling hosted open source software.

I am a huge fan of all of Radon’s work!

Yes, this is the only sane way I found of managing packages on Emacs.  Talented guy!

extremely unrelated to repl.it: thank you for straight.el !

Double speaky &quot;pity us, we&#x27;re just the VC funded, expensive lawyer having, little guy&quot; response post from the founder incoming.

This is a good case study in how to not treat someone, especially a seemingly talented engineer. CEO’s hinting of money raised and legal threat is almost comical.The CEO should have recognized that this is a guy who is interested in this space and should have made every effort to hire&#x2F;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?

What do stock options have to do with anything? The engineers (interns or not) working on the code base are more capable of copying the product that a VP who can&#x27;t write software. A VP would be capable of stealing employees, connections, or clients from the company, which (at least compared to this case) would be much more damaging, sure, but that&#x27;s just a strawman you created to detract from OP&#x27;s argument, which is that the ethics of trying to open source a similar project to your old employers product is morally ambiguous at best.

Did you not get the part about him being an intern.Everything you write would apply for someone on vp level with opportunities and stock option.Get down from there.

Replit is based in SF, and non-competes aren&#x27;t enforceable in California.

Second-hand source here, but I’m pretty sure Riju postdates the author’s internship.IANAL but if he signed a non-compete maybe this could be a legal issue.

I think there might have been a misunderstanding on your point. From what I read, Riju was wholly created after the intern left Repl.it

I&#x27;m not thinking so much about non compete, I&#x27;m thinking about copyright violation or trade secrets (even though it&#x27;s not the most stunning tech here). I specifically see this commit message:&gt; repl.it superiority!!It&#x27;s weird to have that commit message and then to claim Riju is unrelated and not a clone of Repl.it.

&quot;Prior invention&quot; He created Riju AFTER working as an intern at Repl.it. From the article:&gt; I worked for Replit in Summer 2019Also from the article, regarding Riju commits:&gt; 2020-06-05 df9ba38 Initial commit&quot;I can understand&quot; to a degree. That&#x27;s what time-limited non-competes are for. I think a lot depends on what he signed as he was hired and&#x2F;or leaving Repl.it - was there a &quot;you can&#x27;t work for a competitor for x years&quot; type document? Was there something worse?And that&#x27;s not talking about the fact that some states bar non-competes and it was over a year after he left repl.it, what&#x27;s the odds his non-compete was for that long?We obviously have one side of the story - and we know how he said&#x2F;she said stories end up - but from what&#x27;s being told, it seems like he&#x27;s been away for long enough that non-compete to be flimsy at best and unenforceable at worst.

I agree the interaction could have gone more smoothly. I also still think Repl.it and Amjad have reasonable viewpoints. I didn&#x27;t see a panicky or instant legal threat reply from the emails. I saw an email pointing out the copying issue clearly, then a strong and lengthy pushback email from Riju author, and _then_ a reply about lawyers. The &quot;I did nothing wrong&quot; email from Riju author probably seemed benign, but seemed like strong pushback from Amjad.

Even if Repl.it rightly felt it was a breach of their IP, the CEO could have assumed good faith, explained his concerns kindly, and politely requested the project be taken down. The interesting thing is that he seemingly panicked, resorted to legal threats almost immediately, and even stooped to warning the kid that they have deep pockets. It’s like something you’d expect from 90s Microsoft, just more scrappy and trashy. And this is Repl.it, a company where you’d imagine OSS community relations would be a big deal.

How exactly it&#x27;s existential if a single intern could copy their product? Imagine Microsoft&#x2F;GitHub or someone with deep pockets going after them?

Yeah in general this strikes me as a learning lesson. If you&#x27;re at all career-wise (and&#x2F;or have signed a contract recently), this area is usually anywhere from an ethically gray area, to a contractural third rail.A CEO flexing on an early-career SWE is the height of nonsense, but this sounds like an early-career mistake to make on the engineer&#x27;s end.For the SWE it&#x27;s a project, for the CEO it&#x27;s existential. Of course this could go south.

I&#x27;m personally surprised at the responses too. I think it&#x27;s easy to default to &quot;the little open source player is getting screwed over by the big bad corporate entity.&quot; In this case I think it&#x27;s a learning opportunity for the author of the clone.

Say you interned for Twitter for a while - and you decided to create a small open-source self-hosted microblogging site for you to play around with.Bad taste? Unethical? I think that&#x27;s going too far.Since the open-source project here doesn&#x27;t seem to be running at scale nor having support for user-accounts or anything as such. Is working on an open-source toy for the sake of it - somehow unethical because it&#x27;s related to a previous employer&#x27;s product?I work for a financial institution, and if i create a small bit of opensource code in the future (after leaving my current job) that relates to banking, is it unethical or wrong?Quoting the blogpost,&gt;there were 38 visits to Riju during the month of February. (Half of those were probably me.)&gt;the architecture was limited to running on a single server&gt;Riju categorically lacked all of these features, including: having a user account, saving your work, sharing your work, publishing webapps, persistent workspaces, discussion forums, integration with GitHub, etc. etc.

Of course its in bad taste&#x2F;unethical to build any open source clone of a product for a company you used to work for. Doesnt matter how shitty the CEO behaves, how unoriginal the idea you copied is.Incredible that had to scroll so far down HN to find this comment.

Once you no longer work for the company, all bets are off. Just because you employed someone for a while doesn&#x27;t mean you retain ownership of the knowledge they learned while working for you.Barring of course, specific trade secrets or patents. But I have seen none of that here. And, &quot;this kind of looks like what we have&quot; is not a valid legal argument.

Did the author disclose the work on Riju as a prior invention before joining Repl.it? If so that puts him in the clear. I would also check your hiring contract to see what kind of clauses are in there about prior inventions. For larger companies, I don&#x27;t think this company behavior would surprise anyone.I think I can understand where Repl.it is coming from. All I know is this behavior (by Riju author) isn&#x27;t something I would personally want to do. Join a company, leave, and open source something that is directly related to the company&#x27;s business model, whether it undermines their profits or not. It&#x27;s standard for companies (other than Apple) to say &quot;work on whatever tech you want, but if it competes with us, we should evaluate it that&#x27;s OK.&quot;I would at least have gotten their buy-in on the project or idea first. Especially given this commit message:&gt; repl.it superiority!!I also wouldn&#x27;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.

I wish more people on the internet felt this way.

Seems odd but keep in mind we&#x27;ve only heard one side and the truth always sounds obvious when only one side is heard.

Because why not allow users to run completely unsandboxed code on your own servers with no limitations? What could go wrong?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;raxod502&#x2F;python-in-a-box&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;server.js" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;raxod502&#x2F;python-in-a-box&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;serv...</a>

I think one can, but maybe experience has (wrongfully) taught some of those folks that it can actually be a positive experience.If it weren&#x27;t for the INCREDIBLY detailed, well-reasoned, documented blog post, and its ability to reach the front page, the tactics of the CEO would have actually succeeded. He did, indeed, take the project down, and took the threat seriously. What the CEO didn&#x27;t anticipate was the intern&#x27;s ability to get so much exposure on this.I can see this tactic working 95% of the time, which is prob. why when it doesn&#x27;t it REALLY doesn&#x27;t.

One thing I don&#x27;t understand is: how is that a CEO cannot anticipate the consequences of acting like a bully via email? The blog post will make a huge negative impact on the reputation of Replit... really, CEOs these days don&#x27;t think before writing?

The fact that Amjad did this exact thing to Codecademy [0] makes it even more baffling.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;will_ye_&#x2F;status&#x2F;1402016586953678848" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;will_ye_&#x2F;status&#x2F;1402016586953678848</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;amasad&#x2F;status&#x2F;1401617251464138754" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;amasad&#x2F;status&#x2F;1401617251464138754</a>Unbelievable and shameless.

&gt; If anyone knows of one that supports non-web languages (I already use codesandbox for frontend) like python, etc. this is the chance to pitch it.How about a locally hosted lxc container running nothing but sshd, tmux (to share a single tty), nano and whatever compiler&#x2F;interpreter you need? If you want to get real fancy and edit the same file, kakoune has a collaborative editing feature.I might not value my time enough but right now I really don&#x27;t get the value proposition of 70% of saas businesses trending here.

Poor form by the repl.it CEO here, bullying a junior employee to take their weekend project down.If your product is threatened by this, it&#x27;s probably not a very good product.I&#x27;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.

Plenty of people are pleasant in public and shitty in private.

Replit is about everything surrounding the eval() call. The intern&#x27;s clone, according to them, had nothing of this (scaling, user accounts, saving code snippets, ...). If they&#x27;d rebuilt all that too I&#x27;d see the point, but really, what great secrets are there in those &quot;design docs&quot; that just refer to the part of the service where you put in your code and click run? These things have been around for at least a decade, this one just seems to have the most languages.

If it is bizarre for an intern then how does it look when &quot;employee #1 of Code Academy&quot; starts Repl.it right after working on the same kind of thing there? This smells like someone who saw himself in the intern and disliked it.

My guess would be more the available source rather than the website itself. I think it&#x27;s fair to say somebody who interned at a place would have had things explained to them and had access to internal design docs which the intern themselves wouldnt necessarily have figured out if working from scratch.I find it very bizarre for an intern to do this.

The difference between what Amjad tweets publicly and what Amjad threatens the ex-intern privately is jarring.That makes me think that either the tweets are empty virtue signaling; or Amjad is legit worried that an intern open-source project can accidentally outcompete his company!

The threats seem directly at odds with the CEOs tweet here
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;amasad&#x2F;status&#x2F;1401617251464138754" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;amasad&#x2F;status&#x2F;1401617251464138754</a>This whole saga is pretty sad really.While replit isn&#x27;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 &#x2F; insecure attitude.

Take a minute and read before posting, because you are really wrong here buddy...

It doesn&#x27;t scream miscommunication to me. It&#x27;s of course possible to save face claiming that, but they&#x27;re talking about the very same thing, IMO.

Are you aware of how statements like these look to those on the outside of whatever particular good old boys club it is you&#x27;re referencing here?

Hey, you might want to chat with him if you know him, since it seems like he has a personal issue with &quot;copycats&quot;.I don&#x27;t think he was twirling a moustache, but it seems like the idea of being cloned is very personal to Amjad, and he gets emotional about it. You see this both in this exchange and in previous tweets about &quot;copycats&quot;.

In fairness, you’re absolutely right. I’ve even see this play out from the other side, where everybody thinks X is pure and noble, but X was doing worrisome things when no one was looking.But look at this from an “out of body” perspective for a moment. Isn’t it just a little convenient that the first thing you read, right at the top of that blog post, is also the most cartoonishly evil thing? Are you absolutely certain that we’re not missing some crucial context here? How often have we seen this kind of outrage where, later on, it turns out that was a lot more complicated than we’d originally assumed?All that said, yes, you’re correct. And that’s really all that matters. But I can think of a few other things that might be going on (admittedly, I have to be pretty creative to think of something plausible, but they do exist).I’ll keep reading and start asking around. Maybe the cartoonishly evil thing is the true thing, but if it’s not, at least I won’t have fallen for it.(And it it was the true thing, I will be hat in hand with apologies. Heck, I’d be the first to bring a pitchfork if this was true at face value.)

When will society learn the lesson that people&#x27;s goodness and &quot;pureness&quot; is based on the actions they take, and not on the opinions they hold or the manner they hold in private company.

It sure screams of malicious intent. It would take a redaction&#x2F;clarification from the CEO to prove otherwise. But my guess is he will try to ignore it and hope the problem goes away without too much brand impact. Would love to be wrong about that.

The miscommunication angle could have been argued after the first emails. But once double downs and legal threats ensue, Hanlon&#x27;s Razor doesn&#x27;t apply.

Directly threaten a person with a lawsuit without any remediation is just wrong.

I just... Amjad has been excellent, and I’ve never gotten the sense he would do something like this. It doesn’t even make sense for him to worry at all, let alone to send legal threats. Replit is at “early google&#x2F;Microsoft vibes,” as pg put it. It would be hard for anything to kill replit, unless they do it themselves.I saw this pop up while I was out driving to the gas station, but I was so shocked that I wanted to urge caution. Now that I’m back, I too will look carefully at all sides. Thank you for vouching for Radon — it helps to know that this isn’t just someone with a chip on their shoulder making up stories.Admittedly, if I have to reach for “maybe it’s a lie,” it’s not looking great. But the fair thing to do is to wait and hear from amjad.What kind of stuff have you done together? I haven’t worked directly with Amjad, but some years ago I almost joined, and we’ve since thrown around ideas for how to use ML to build some great tooling at replit. He strikes me as extremely reasonable, and I’ve seen him change his mind from talking with him. (It wasn’t just a technical plan that he changed his mind about; it was a tricky social situation thing.) I didn’t get the sense he would stomp on someone.I agree it’s possible I was off the mark, and if so, I’ll readjust. But I believe in him. So I won’t let myself be dragged to a certain judgement without listening to the other side of the story first, no matter how bad it looks.But it’s fair if other people don’t feel that way. It’s just, the inside situation often looks much, much different, y’know? It’s good to wait and see.

Well, if we want to supply character evidence, I know Radon.And I believe that not only were his intentions good, but also his actions.Although I would still like to hear Amjad’s side of the story.

Guys, I don’t know what this is about yet, but I know amjad (ceo). And I know that whatever is going on here, his intentions were pure. He’s proven himself to me that he’s pretty much the opposite of a sleezy corporate ceo who crushes intern side projects while twirling his mustache.I just wanted to encourage everybody to chill on it for a moment and wait to see what’s up, because my spidey senses are screaming “miscommunication &#x2F; crossed wires” rather than malicious intent, for what it’s worth.EDIT: Fuck. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;cFYq7Nv.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;cFYq7Nv.png</a>I&#x27;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.

Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project