Comment by jeffybefffy519
5 years ago
Of course its in bad taste/unethical to build any open source clone of a product for a company you used to work for. Doesnt matter how shitty the CEO behaves, how unoriginal the idea you copied is.
Incredible that had to scroll so far down HN to find this comment.
Say you interned for Twitter for a while - and you decided to create a small open-source self-hosted microblogging site for you to play around with.
Bad taste? Unethical? I think that's going too far.
Since the open-source project here doesn't seem to be running at scale nor having support for user-accounts or anything as such. Is working on an open-source toy for the sake of it - somehow unethical because it's related to a previous employer's product?
I work for a financial institution, and if i create a small bit of opensource code in the future (after leaving my current job) that relates to banking, is it unethical or wrong?
Quoting the blogpost,
>there were 38 visits to Riju during the month of February. (Half of those were probably me.)
>the architecture was limited to running on a single server
>Riju categorically lacked all of these features, including: having a user account, saving your work, sharing your work, publishing webapps, persistent workspaces, discussion forums, integration with GitHub, etc. etc.
I'm personally surprised at the responses too. I think it's easy to default to "the little open source player is getting screwed over by the big bad corporate entity." In this case I think it's a learning opportunity for the author of the clone.