Comment by jfrunyon

"Fixed" title: "Replit asked former employee with thorough inside knowledge of their operations to take down copycat project which he sent directly to the CEO"

It's like y'all have never heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design. No, building a direct competitor to a business you have previously worked for is generally not ethical, and will almost always end up being infringing, because even if you're not trying to copy their code/design/whatever, you almost certainly will.

By the way, allowing users to run their own code, unsandboxed, on your dime, is generally a bad idea. What happens when someone uses it to distribute $illegal_material? Or send spam? Or starts logging what other people are running?