Comment by abricot
5 years ago
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.
5 years ago
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.