Comment by Exuma
5 years ago
The area that seemed gray here particularly was the "internal decisions part." As someone who has designed maybe... 40+ interfaces, I know the tremendous amount of effort and thought that goes into the simple placement of a button being on the left or the right, with huge impacts to usability and user experience.
So when he posts a few images of other sites that "look" similar, I don't quite buy the fact that he didn't liberally borrow from the many hours of decisions by Repli. Thats purely a guess though, and I could absolutely be wrong.
I would imagine it would be easy for the author to rationalize it in his head that "well, lots of other sites have a button in the top row I can do it too!" and in effect, ends up copying a lot of Replit features without innovating on them simply because other sites "look similar"
I picture myself as a CEO seeing a previous employee with something that is very clearly using a lot of the decisions we worked out together, and then see a list of 20 bullet points trying to rationalize why it's ok, that would be super irritating to me, but that would be the limit of it. Definitely not worthy of anything more than a polite conversation, that's for sure.
Assume I am an employee. Assume I take a year or two of these internal decisions during my tenure at an org to my next employer. Would you be equally upset that my work experience was used elsewhere? Where is the line between your trade secret and my hard earned work experience?
Because that’s what work experience is: showing future employers where not to make mistakes that were previously learned in the course of work. That knowledge (that has a half life) is part of my compensation, arguably the most valuable of my total comp.
Lots of CEOs/Owners will definitely be salty about that. And they're not totally wrong to feel that way. You pay someone a bunch of money only to watch them walk and help your competitor take your market share. It's understandable why that's upsetting. But they should have the maturity to understand that's how the world works and not throw a tantrum.
> You pay someone a bunch of money only to watch them walk and help your competitor take your market share. It's understandable why that's upsetting.
No, it really isn't because that's how business works. This is like getting upset that my plumber might fix my competitors' pipes, too.
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It’s almost entirely within the employer’s power to make it worthwhile for key employees to not leave for their competitors.
That wouldn't upset me because that is simply knowledge not implementation.
As I said in the other reply, my post is at an emotional/personal level (as an owner/creator and also employer), not necessarily a legal or more political one. On that basis i 100% side with the author here.
I was merely saying this situation definitely smells like one where there's more to the story than "big bad replit picking on poor innocent open source guy". Just the tone of his writing seems, and the "one of most difficult interns" gives me gut reaction that he might actually be someone who tries to be pushy while being nice.
> Just the tone of his writing seems, and the "one of most difficult interns" gives me gut reaction that he might actually be someone who tries to be pushy while being nice.
You took a single sentence out of an entire article with plenty of other supporting evidence to construct a reality where someone in a similar position as you would have cover.
It's extraordinary.
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If you ever move between two big tech firms, they'll sit you down in a room with a lawyer who clarifies exactly where that line is.
IANAL, but roughly, general knowledge is ok, but specific results aren't. If you were party to user research findings at company A, it's likely against your NDA to tell company B "we should do X" based on the remembered outcome of that research.
this is precisely why companies poach employees from their competitors...
But the UI is public. Did Replit copyright or patent the UI design?
Copyright doesn’t really apply to UI designs.
Patents can apply, but it’s really only used in novel and unique situations. Even if Replit had a patient on its UI/UX design, if you were able to find evidence of prior art, you could petition to invalidate.
Not to disagree with you. Didn't Apple sue Microsoft for copying the Mac UI on copyright ground? I know they settled, not sure what's the real legal outcome of it.
Edit: Ok, just looked it up. Apple lost all claims on copyrighting the Mac UI.
I'm not saying anything on legal basis. I'm saying simply emotionally, the perspective of someone using something I have designed, regardless of patent, after we work together... that would be a negative situation for me.
That's on a personal level, which is why I said "its worth nothing more than a polite conversation"
I think the CEO is an absolute knob jockey for threatening to sue. That's ludicrous to me.
> I think the CEO is an absolute knob jockey for threatening to sue.
"knob jockey"? WTF? Why would you comment on what you think the CEO's sexuality is in this context? That's awful and seems really out of place here.
Please refrain from using homophobic language.