Comment by stevebmark
5 years ago
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'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't something I would personally want to do. Join a company, leave, and open source something that is directly related to the company's business model, whether it undermines their profits or not. It's standard for companies (other than Apple) to say "work on whatever tech you want, but if it competes with us, we should evaluate it that's OK."
I would at least have gotten their buy-in on the project or idea first. Especially given this commit message:
> repl.it superiority!!
I also wouldn't use intentions or the fact that it currently has less traffic than Repl.it as example of why this is harmless. I would approach this with an empathetic view to how a company would see an engineer leaving and then open sourcing something directly related to the company, based on what they learned while working at the company.
Once you no longer work for the company, all bets are off. Just because you employed someone for a while doesn'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, "this kind of looks like what we have" is not a valid legal argument.
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.
I agree the interaction could have gone more smoothly. I also still think Repl.it and Amjad have reasonable viewpoints. I didn'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 "I did nothing wrong" email from Riju author probably seemed benign, but seemed like strong pushback from Amjad.
As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I saw a complete jackass reaction that tarnishes the reputation of repl.it.
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.
Replit is based in SF, and non-competes aren't enforceable in California.
All YC companies are legally based in Delaware. Though if the work is done in California, I do not know if the Delaware laws are enforceable, even if the case is settled in Delaware.
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I'm pretty sure you can't leave a compagny and create a similar project copy pasting the same design / idea that you knew while working in the previous compagny.
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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
Yeah in general this strikes me as a learning lesson. If you're at all career-wise (and/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's end.
For the SWE it's a project, for the CEO it's existential. Of course this could go south.
How exactly it's existential if a single intern could copy their product? Imagine Microsoft/GitHub or someone with deep pockets going after them?
My point is the view of the world for the two parties here is totally different (unless you are a founder on the edge of success without enough funding on the line to lose your mind at an intern, and if so - interested on your take).
Not empathizing with the founder other than noting it would be sort of predicable for the founder to react like this. IP is big
"Prior invention" He created Riju AFTER working as an intern at Repl.it. From the article:
> I worked for Replit in Summer 2019
Also from the article, regarding Riju commits:
> 2020-06-05 df9ba38 Initial commit
"I can understand" to a degree. That's what time-limited non-competes are for. I think a lot depends on what he signed as he was hired and/or leaving Repl.it - was there a "you can't work for a competitor for x years" type document? Was there something worse?
And that's not talking about the fact that some states bar non-competes and it was over a year after he left repl.it, what's the odds his non-compete was for that long?
We obviously have one side of the story - and we know how he said/she said stories end up - but from what's being told, it seems like he's been away for long enough that non-compete to be flimsy at best and unenforceable at worst.
I'm not thinking so much about non compete, I'm thinking about copyright violation or trade secrets (even though it's not the most stunning tech here). I specifically see this commit message:
> repl.it superiority!!
It's weird to have that commit message and then to claim Riju is unrelated and not a clone of Repl.it.
That read very tongue in cheek to me. It'd be akin to creating a microblogging platform in a weekend without any production-ready engineering, yet claiming superiority over Twitter on a commit bumping the post limit to 560 characters.
And then having Twitter threatening to sue.
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It is explained
Of course its in bad taste/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.
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's going too far.
Since the open-source project here doesn'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's related to a previous employer'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,
>there were 38 visits to Riju during the month of February. (Half of those were probably me.)
>the architecture was limited to running on a single server
>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.
I'm personally surprised at the responses too. I think it's easy to default to "the little open source player is getting screwed over by the big bad corporate entity." In this case I think it's a learning opportunity for the author of the clone.
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.
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'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's just a strawman you created to detract from OP'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.
The only thing morally ambiguous here is the idea that a previous employer gets to somehow own everything you learned while in their employ in perpetuity and can decide whether you are allowed to try to make a living or not.
If he didn't directly copy code or steal IP or some amazing trade secrets that he contracted never to share, then there is nothing wrong either legally or ethically.
What does copying the code base have at all to do with this situation? Who are now creating a straw man argument?
We're not talking about IP. The company had nothing technical that the writer stole from them.
What he did was not even comparable as a product to what they created!
"the ethics of trying to open source a similar project to your old employers product is morally ambiguous at best" would have applied if he had made a product at all!
> the ethics of trying to open source a similar project to your old employers product is morally ambiguous at best
I don't think it's bad at all, considering replit is itself built on open-source software, and the CEO is a loud champion of open-source software, and the intern's project only explores one relatively small aspect (number of languages supported) of the problem space while purposefully ignoring all the other stuff necessary to build a competing product
Non-competes in California are non-enforceable with the exception of certain stock-holding company executives.