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Comment by Grustaf

5 years ago

It would be helpful if you could post the designs side by side so we could all judge if you have copied the design. If you haven't, they are simply in the wrong and you should re-publish you site. If your design is a copy, then most of your arguments are not very relevant.

> Every similarity between my project and Replit can be explained by looking only at GitHub repositories and blog posts that were published online by Replit itself, making them obviously not any kind of secret.

I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to copy their design even if it is public.

Most of the bullets under "In my opinion, the answer to this question is no, for a number of reasons" also seem beside the point. It's not allowed, or ethical, to copy an existing service just because yours is free, or "not intended to compete".

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Grustaf

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jsmith45  5 years ago

He has a second page with that shows the UIs (not quite side by side, but you can easily scroll up and down to compare them). His is extremely minimalistic. It looks pretty much exactly how I would picture a weekend project like this to look.

The only real similarities are the use of a green colored run button near the top (Which replit stole from IDEs anyway), and the basic, black screen terminal on right, white background text editor on left layout.

>I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to copy their design even if it is public.

He is arguing against the allegation of violating their trade secrets. The similarities being based on public information makes them not valid as trade secrets. If you publish your trade secrets, they are not trade secrets anymore.

cole-k  5 years ago

Riju is down, but I had a chance to use it for a few minutes when it was up. To me it was very similar to tio.run, so take a look and see for yourself how they are similar to repl.it.

autarch  5 years ago

> I don't see how this is an argument. You're not allowed to copy their design even if it is public.

That's not true. This depends entirely on the license of the relevant (repl.it) GitHub projects that the author is referencing. I don't know of any open source license that allows you to copy & modify code but somehow forbids you from reusing intangible design elements.

This case is a little confusing, since it sounds like a case of simply producing a similar result _without_ copying any code from the repl.it repo. But given that you can copy the code to get the same result (again, assuming a FOSS license), I don't see how the license could forbid someone from using the same design _without_ copying code. But IANAL.

  • greenshackle2  5 years ago

    > again, assuming a FOSS license

    replit is not open source though. Only some parts of it are.

    You can infringe copyright without copy-pasting code. If I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, burn my only copy of the book, then write and publish Jerry Schmotter and the Alchemist's Gem, a novel about a teenage boy with a star-shaped scar, etc., I'm probably infringing copyright even if I didn't word-for-word copy any part of a Harry Potter book.

    There's a reason why "clean room" design exists; to maximally protect yourself against claims of infringement, you want the implementers of your copycat product to not even have seen the original implementation:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

    Copy-pasted code is a smoking gun but it's not necessary.

    (I really have no idea if replit would have a case though. Seems dubious. But generally Copyright law is murkier than what some programmers think.)

burnished  5 years ago

Honestly I think they make their point quite well, but some of those bullets points came across as a young person adding any argument they could think of/needing some validation on these points with the net effect that it weakened the overall argument (by being easily nitpicked).