Comment by yellow_lead
5 years ago
A fancy funded company like Replit getting scared by an intern's weekend project is entertaining. If your moat is so low it can be replicated in a few days, I think this open source project is the least of their worries.
They offered to hire him before insinuating he was a bad/demanding intern, as well. This is standard manipulative behavior and has little benefit to anyone besides attempting to make the intern feel bad. This isn't the first time I've seen a founder resort to this exact type of behavior before threatening legal action.
Reading this part really made my head shake. Attacking a former intern like that, why would anyone want to intern there after this?
That's why I'm glad the OP spoke up. Abusive behavior like this shouldn't be tolerated in the industry and is sadly common. Now I know to avoid this company and individual.
Who would want to use replit after reading that? They might have just killed their company. All it would really take is for this guy to put his site back up and add shared links.
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You should check out Replit's Glassdoor reviews - avoid!
I would play devil'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.
> a level of trust here
Trust is destroyed as soon as your first reaction to something is to summon lawyers.
I actually somewhat agreed until I read "I will be engaging our lawyers on Monday if it is still up by then."
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> 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)
I don’t get what you’re saying here. It’s not a breach of trust to speak publicly about someone threatening legal action against you.
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In regards to your comment about the situation being a bit muddier than presented: I would suggest that you take a look through the unabridged version as linked in the post ( https://web.archive.org/web/20210530184721/https://imgur.com... )
Rather than downvoting your comment I opted to reply to it since it may provide a bit more information for you to base your judgement on about "things being muddier".
As for your last comment about their abilities - forgive me but that sounds incredibly unfair and unwarranted and verges on being a personal attack.
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> Also there appers to be a level of trust here.
Amjad, replit's CEO, offered to hire OP, later accused them of copying their "internal designs", then threatened them with lawyers replit's millions can buy, eventually to stonewall and stop replying to their emails. What kind of trust is that?
> Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
That's a valid perspective, alright. One that's minority I sincerely hope.
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I'm pretty skeptical. I think a rational actor wouldn't have made legal threats. Even if OP's project does somehow use some secret insight from replit, it's certainly not a threat to replit's business in any way. Legal action would be a waste of time, money, and PR.
Which means that the legal threats levelled against OP are presumably coming from a place of emotion and personal resentment, and I'm very much not prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt to replit under those circumstances.
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I don't think anyone who doesn't work for you has any obligation whatsoever to consider your image. As a CEO and public face of a company you should go ahead and assume that anyone you threaten or badmouth will go ahead and talk about it online, on the news, or with a bullhorn at the local mall.
He willingly traded some percentage chance at a competitor using an open source project to steal some percentage of his business for this PR nightmare. Personally I think this effort shows the bar for such a project is pretty low so I don't think shutting it down was a good trade off. I think it shows immaturity, bad will, bad faith and honestly its more of a case study in whom not to work for. Most people they would want to hire are liable to have multiple options. They can ill afford to be an undesirable choice.
> Not sure how talented OP is.
Based on the commit log in the article, he added support for running code in 79 programming languages in 4 days. I'd say he's probably pretty talented.
It's not the whole picture, but the article links to the full email exchange. It's difficult for me to imagine what missing information would lead to the CEO's messages being appropriate.
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> at least the Replit CEO trusted that OP will not make this go viral on HN and spiral into a PR nightmare I suppose,
From reading the emails, it looks like the Replit CEO "trusted" that the OP was cowed into submission.
Talent or not, having the passion to put together a crazy project like this that has no real practical use but is very interesting - I would want to hire that person over someone with a bit more skill.
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Well, the author did post the entire email thread (redacting information that may be proprietary) on Imgur.
Personally, I think the Replit CEO could have explained what the specific issues were before threatening to sue. Since there was no explanation on the CEO's part, I think it's perfectly warranted for the author to make this public.
Interesting to see my post fluctuating between -4~4 points in the first few hours before settling down with the downvotes :)
Thanks guys for the comments. Definitely helps to view this matter from more angles, and it's clearer now. This is certainly a case study of who not to work for. (I didn't know so much about Replit and its CEO prior and totally missed the totalitarian vibe he is giving)
Curious to see how much the Replit community & ecosystem would be affected this event.
This is now on the first page of HN Search https://hn.algolia.com/
Yeah, we are just getting one side.
That said, all the possible IP in something like this is in security, reliability, scalability and good UX.
Severely doubt the OP spent much time on that.
The CEO is probably just having trouble dealing with stress and is acting out. It happens.
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Unless there was an NDA or some such (and since this isn't mentioned anywhere in the emails or post, I assume there's not) you can hardly sue someone for re-using knowledge they acquired during their job. How are you even supposed to know what the supposed super-magic super-secret sauce is if you never agreed to an NDA?
If that was the case almost everyone with a GitHub project could be sued to infinity, because almost everyone learns tons of things every day while working.
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It'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't even created to compete.
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.
Mentioned in my other comment, but just all the more evidence of a megalomaniac, insecure CEO trying to build a company out of shallow moats and little value creation
He's deleting a lot of tweets as we speak.. I think he got famous
Link to your tweet, please?
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Yeah - I don't really like piling on, but Replit and Roam both give off massive alarms for me regarding the founders.
Both seem to think they're Xerox PARC - or the most ambitious software companies on earth, both products seem pretty underwhelming.
Just seems wildly disproportionate to what they'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're trying to accomplish, and Galen is not an ass about it.
Right? REPL.it is - unironically - a weekend project, that the founder loves to pretend is a marvel of engineering
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Right, I get the same impression from Replit. I don't know why I got subscribed to some weird accelerator newsletter they started and the wording is akin to the nigerian prince scam (and as a side note a REPL website creating an accelerator for sure gives me some dotcom bubble vibes).
I'm sure there are a lot of incredibly clever startup founders out there but I get the impression that more than not you attract founders that are more interested in the status rather than the innovation aspect. I said status not money as a lot of the time these folks don't really care about money as long as they can add a "Founder of X, an YC funded company" on their profile and share their next viral tweet, with lots of adjectives, lots of buzzwords and no depth. Startup funding became a game of convincing others that you as a person deserve the funding, not the company itself.
Well, these are things that most tech people know, we just don't discuss them because we're polite.
Word on the street is that the Roam founder Conan is also getting pushed out for dehumanizing women and abusing meth, and being a general jackass. Silicon Valley has the best culture.
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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.
We had a startup called Runnable in 2013 that did a similar thing as repl.it. Coding sandboxes in many languages by spinning up docker containers on the backend [1]. We solved a lot of scaling problems, but I honestly thought the innovation was mostly handled by docker. And that was by 2013.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20140702013410/http://runnable.co...
Pfizer doesn't really belong in that list. They applied money to an already made invention and scaled up an existing manufacturing process along with a dozen other companies. Pfizer is not even the only manufacturer of the BioNTech vaccine, nor is it the first manufacturer to express interest, nor did it take any risk.
I'd say the most innovative company in the world is probably Alphabet or Samsung.
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Are you referring to Pfizer because of the mRNA-vaccine? That has actually been invented by the German biotech startup BioNTech ;-)
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I feel great that others see how ridiculous Amjad is… Replit is cool but has a serious attitude.
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's crazy how a little bit of money can turn people into jerks.
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 "WTF" in court. Future CEOs will know that "an intern would need three days to technically replicate" is not a differentiator. Also, hope is not a strategy. VCs would learn that hearing BS from CEO is not "due diligence".
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.
How long would it take an intern to replicate Twitter? Is Twitter worth millions? I think so.
I think it'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'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't replicate in a weekend.
Creating a facebook clone has been done by many and some like vk have achieved regional success but they are in that unique position because of brand. Facebook started to be used as a word I'll facebook you meant I will write you. That is similiar to I'll google that means to search for something.
Facebook playbook for market rise is legendary. The limited rollout, the college based communities based on your edu email created this campus privacy and campus group. Starting off with the ivy league schools and slowly working into other schools created this demand as people talked. By the time facebook opened to the general public they had such a buzz. When they rolled out to this group they included one killer feature.. they allowed you to give your hotmail email/password and they would get a list of your contacts from your email and invite them to facebook. That brought in your aunt, brother, old friends to facebook. That created a network effect. Throw in the whatapps story and instagram story and an election/congressional hearings and you have facebook today.
The code part seems so minor. Retracing their steps is impossible. The path to facebook killer is a huge challenge to think that could only be done in a weekend is crazy.
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Replit is crushing it on reputation at the moment.
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't know that the code here doesn't scale.
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's hard to imagine a competitor struggling to overcome it.
You are right. Other than the brand name recognition and the existing business relationships, I can't think of anything that would be tough for a funded competitor to replicate.
Doesn't seem to stop a lot of products when they target B2B or enterprise for whom the value proposition is actually the marketing, support, layers of regulatory compliance etc that they add. LastPass is an example. Whether Replit is doing that I don't know, but its a real model. Not, however one that is vulnerable to weekend projects.
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're doing... whether or not this is a threat to them right now. There'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 "allies" 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 "secrets of the trade", 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 "stealing the idea"?? Just don'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'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'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's business as usual in the corporate world.
> 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're doing.. whether or not this is a threat to them right now. There's a tiny, but non-zero chance, that this project could become successful and who knows, take marketshare from repl.it...
Too bad, that's business and how a functioning free market works. If it's that important to Replit, then they should patent it. If they can't get a patent then, again, too bad.
There are other legitimate ways of protecting trade secrets, such as requiring people to sign an NDA and/or non-compete before they see your secret sauce.
I'm not defending how the CEO behaved here - it looks very unprofessional at best - but the patent system is not the only or the best mechanism to enforce intellectual property rights.
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Why bother? Seems throwing their money around is functionality well enough.
Not sure what they'll do if another company decides to reinvent it.. but /shrug
(to be clear, not defending them at all)
>Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of people to work on some product, you teach them "secrets of the trade", 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.
Codecademy does let you run code in the browser, so they would actually have a case at least as strong as repl.it does against this intern.
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I'm sorry but this is a lot of words to say "be subservient to your old boss". There'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'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.
> it is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do that.
Ideas aren't worth the paper they're written on, and a startup founder should know that better than anyone else. Hell, wasn't Fairchild "the same idea" 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.
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 / 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's 'crime' is, though I suspect the worst of it is that OP's actions revealed how threadbare the Emperor's clothes are.
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 before
Wit this silly logic, nobody can ever work for a compeitor.
Was Zoom's CEO unprofessional for starting Zoom after working so long in WebEx? How about Jet.com founder after working at Amazon?
Well, but most people are saying the company shouldn't be afraid of an intern... and you are rightly pointing out that ex-employees take what they've learned and start a competitor all the time, sometimes very successfully (I do think some of your examples are imoral if you ask me, but in business, I know that what's not illegal gets a pass however repugnant)... that's why so many companies have contracts that will forbid you from doing so (illegal in some jurisdictions, but I believe it's legal in most).
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> how is that not at least "stealing the idea"??
Because Replit didn't originate the idea of "web site you can execute code on". There's no idea to be stolen here, or if there was stealing, it's not from Replit.
> working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they're doing
Radon outlined why this isn't true. [1]
> 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're advocating that Radon should've treated the open-source code as if it was closed? [1]
> This is incredibly unprofessional
In 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've ever seen..
> Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years
hUHH ???
[1] https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/evidence
> 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
With 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.
> If he had at least come up with something original based on that knowledge
Repl.it itself is completely unoriginal... there's been websites doing this stuff for decades now. Of course, the CEO has to live in denial of this, and is easily threatened/offended when confronted by this reality.
> there's been websites doing this stuff for decades now.
Would this hold up in case of a lawsuit? I mean, can Replit's CEO accuse the guy of copying some of their work if there's evidence of prior art that predates both projects?
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So once I've done one kind of work I shouldn't ever do that again for fear of offending my previous employer? Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds?
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.
I mean, it's even in the name - REPL - it's been invented before.
", is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least "stealing the idea"??"
Vague general ideas like "a car" or "140 character limit" are not property, and so cannot be stolen.
Acting this way is superbly entitled.
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.
Of course he's naive. He's just out of college, would you have been more savvy at that age?
No. I didn't even say I was any less naive :D I am talking from experience, almost got into trouble because of similar behaviour, but after thinking hard about the situation, I decided that I was actually in the wrong for thinking I can just take what I learned and give it for free to the world and my old company's competitors to do as they wish. I can see how I, as the CEO, would've not thought nicely of such behaviour.
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If they were that valuable why would you ever let them leave?
You can'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.
A huge number of companies including YC companies are built by Ex Amazon and ex Google employees cloning corporate tech.
100% agree. If this threatened them, it means they are not doing well.
Or it may simply reflect the personal style and values of the CEO Amjad Masad notwithstanding their company position.
Or both.
Clearly their investors should have funded the intern!
That's part of why someone is a threat to your moat. You don't assume that a good rival effort will go unnoticed by investors and customers.
The whole startup space is disgusting. There are a bunch of lucky founders 'chosen ones' who get a ton of VC funding; as soon as they accept VC funding, users 'magically' start pouring in (cabal/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'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/friends enriching themselves by destroying society.
I think I am going to make Riju clone next weekend, got a name even: Disreplty.
I think we should flood the internet with replit clones :) How much money would they want to invest in lawyers?
Honestly there's no need? There's thousands anyway?
As OP says any value add is about accounts and sharing and whatever, the code-running in a browser functionality is two a penny.
replitsuperiority would be a good one too.
They were funded by YCombinator. Should we expect other YC companies to go after open source projects?
I would love to know how YC does their DD because it seems like it’s the most shallow and uninformed, meme-driven process.
It appears there's at least a little nepotism and/or incompetence at play, considering crap like Dreamworld got YC'd
https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-kickst...
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Why would funding by YC in any way suggest that a startup might not do that?
I wouldn'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't able to shut it down, and the new founder has raised a nice round. I'd love to see Radon succeed with his project.
IANAL but I don't think you can patent "path depencence". It is sunk cost
They cannot as it was already published (by... them)
If you can maybe they would have done it already. But they haven't so we can all use it.
Exactly my thoughts. CEO knows anyone could replicate the project.
I even go so far to say that the CEO doesn't want his secret to out that he is not that great programmer after all. He just took someone else's idea and build a company around it.
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.
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.
Sounds like the plot of the movie Antitrust.
Only if you equate sternly worded letters from the CEO with a visit from murderous thugs who steal your stuff.
Harassing independent developers working is an important component of the Antitrust plot. And that's what the replit guy is doing.
The movie shows the conflict between open source and proprietary software. Between altruism and financial opportunity.
I don't think threatening an extortionate lawsuit that's going to cost 100k$ is morally any better as stealing 100k$ worth of stuff and destroying it.
VC funded companies aren't some tech billionaire funding a cool new project.
VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn't be surprising when people try very hard to protect that investment to help them get a better return.
> VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn'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.
"People try very hard to protect that investment and that's why gangsters tracked down where you live and broke your legs"
If someone is invested and stands to loose money, it does not gice them a free pass to act immorally.
It doesn't have to be surprising to be entertaining!
Out of curiosity, how hard is "very hard"?
It sits next to the midpoint between "hard" and "very, very hard"
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