Comment by jwilber
5 years ago
If the CEO didn’t throw a tantrum over the exact things his company claims to support (OSS, creativity, etc.), nobody would know about the intern’s weekend project. But he did, and now we’ll see something of a Streisand effect [0].
To be fair, it is kind of suspect to intern for a company and, at the end of that internship, turn around and create effectively the same thing. And OP’s dismissive tone and propensity to hand wave away things that may be relevant in his blogpost certainly don’t make them seem ideal to employ. But ‘suspect’ only in the sense that (in my personal opinion) it gives credence to the CEO’s comment on the intern being difficult. I still think replit is in the wrong here.
Well, let's hope repl.it wasn't started by someone working on the same kind of tech at another well-known brand. It would be ironic or "kind of suspect", no?
https://www.codecademy.com/resources/blog/amjad-joins-codeca...
this was before amasad created replit as an open source project
He interned there two years ago, I would hardly call this at the end of the internship turn around.
I had nearly the same feeling while reading this and specifically finally getting to the part where the author mentions they were an intern. Being an intern at the company is kinda important to this story, had they not been an intern at the company I think this would have been a vastly different conversation.
I honestly think both are in the wrong here, the CEO should have been a bit more relaxed about the handling of this. As well the intern really should have tried to stay away from projects which directly relate to past company business models.
I also question if this article could be considered defamatory.
I think for something to be legal defamation, it has to be demonstrably false. This article seems pretty safe, since it's mostly direct screenshots of the emails sent by the CEO.
Non-competes are unethical and also illegal in California where replit is based.
Edit: They aren't technically "illegal" in CA, just unenforceable.
Based on what I am reading, unless I am misunderstanding, which considering how our laws are written I'm surprised anyone is capable of understanding them entirely.
https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in... (where I am reading up about this from)
It seems California outlawed non-competes in the sense that if I am a programmer, and I sign a contract which states that I must not be a programmer for the next 5 years after working for X, that is instantly voided.
But this is different, as an intern I copied in essence the core business model (not directly copying the code) and open sourced it, seems like a conflict of interest. Which in this case a non-compete might be able to be held as it's mostly saying I'm a programmer for a company which does X, I can't move to a competitor, or become a competitor (which is somewhat what the intern did).
As someone who is definitely not a lawyer or judge I have no idea where the laws/courts or otherwise stand on this matter in actuality.
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Is it really? It's what he learned to do at the company, so now he's doing it.
If the product was really unique, maybe. But from the description it seems to be a generic online repl.