Comment by vidarh
5 years ago
I mean, this was a marketing opportunity. They could've asked nicely if he'd be willing to link to repl.it for anyone who wants something more solid and scalable. It sounds from the early e-mails as if OP started out very positively predisposed towards them.
Instead they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty.
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.
The lawyer powerplay _and_ also disparaging the OP by calling them a difficult intern.
I could give the legal peacocking a pass. It's a weird flex, a bit too much ego really, but sure, I don't care if your daddy is cooler than my daddy.
Punching down at your intern though, as a CEO? Jeez, talk about poor leadership. I would not work for that man.
> they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they'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.
Yep it's a very small step from suing a friendly collaborator to suing a customer. Ask Oracle.
> litigious and petty
The unfortunate truth is that this doesn't matter. Oracle, as one recent example, is still wildly successful - even in the open source space.
Oracle lives by selling to management. Replit isn’t at a stage where it can do that - it will love and die by developer goodwill until it becomes big enough for management to want to buy it.
Are they, though? I’ve never come across Oracle Linux used for any other purpose than running Oracle software on it. MySQL and Java were very popular before Oracle bought them, and people’s distaste for Oracle has pushed many users towards alternatives like PostgreSQL or MariaDB. Google famously wrote their own Java implementation to avoid having to deal with Oracle.