Comment by amasad

California law does not recognize non-compete agreements. Your heardquarters are in San Francisco. Good luck. Unless you have ironclad evidence that he stole intellectual property from your company you don't have a legal case to stand on.

I have offered to pay the student's legal fees in exchange for putting the GitHub repository back up, with the provision of reviewing the contracts he signed with you to ensure there is no terms that he could be violating, after review with my own lawyers.

I was also considering working for your company when considering changing forms, but I never would after hearing about this episode.

Your remarks about "YC shouldn't fund copycats" are especially ironic given that Repl.it is by far not the first company to make programming online easy to do. I was involved in acquisition of Cloud9.io (now AWS Cloud9 IDE – the original site has been taken down from the Wayback Machine but you can see plenty of their work in articles if you search Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=cloud9+io+startup ) – they provided an online IDE, terminal, full Linux environment, and the ability to program in many different programming languages.

Personally, I don't have an enmity against copying. If you copy what another company does and execute better, that's progress. Amazon.com was just the Sears catalog with a website and faster shipping. But it's sadly ironic that you have this negative view against idea-copying while your own company is dense in a space of competitors that offer online code editing and evaluation – some of which have already exited, as I mentioned above.

It copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws. That's the hallmark of copying versus merely writing one's own program to solve the same problem.

Or the hallmark of having experience working in a particular domain, and simply favoring techniques and approaches that are familiar. Is there any particular reason why anybody should believe that any of these "unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture" constitute any kind of genuine "intellectual property" in either a legal OR moral sense??

I mean, if you're arguing that he literally copied copyrighted code, then sure, OK, maybe you have something. But nebulous appeals to "design decisions?" Don't expect many people to have sympathy for that. At some point you're treading into "anybody who ever worked for a company making cars can never work for another car company" or "A guy who makes a new chair owes money to everyone who ever built a chair" territory.

repl.it has been a project I've admired and recommended for a long time. The same can be said for many members of this community.

A few reasons why there's so much anger, in my estimation:

- When you support a project, you want its leaders to embody decent values.

- You have always projected an image of someone who's "nice" and doing things right. You cannot bully your intern in private and keep that image.

- Most importantly, you are now in the Goliath position and you are acting tyrannically. It's hard to side with someone going "I have raised $20M and I will use it to crush you" to their previous intern. The fact that you did not explain your concerns, jumped straight to legal threats, and did not want to talk after the project was taken down looks quite bad. If you had approached it in a more diplomatic fashion, you would not be public enemy #1 on HN.

Understand the position you're in. You wield a big stick; speak softly.

P.S. it's perfectly understandable that you'd have concerns about the project, though IMHO it's an overreaction. That's not the issue. The issue is _how_ you approached it.

Hi Amjad, thanks for taking the time to respond. Can you please talk to Radon and work with him to remove the offending "unique and invisible" aspects, to make it so he can put his project back up? There must be some way to make it so that these projects can co-exist without causing any trouble, and it can probably done in a way that is much cheaper than bringing a lawsuit.

>It copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws.

And yet you haven’t managed to tell anyone what these “invisible” aspects are. So it kind of just sounds like you’re making things up.

Could you explain roughly what was the biggest tell that he copied Replit's architecture patterns? No need to go into details, but perhaps this would make your side of the story more clear.

So far we only have seen Radon's post and emails screenshots. He seems to be very adamant about not copying any of Replit's IP. But clearly every story has two sides and I think it's very important to hear yours. Hopefully it will come in the form of a blog post or similar.

Genuinely curious and not taking sides with anyone here. I just believe that the OSS community can learn from this.

Instead of blaming the readers, Why not just explain the legal merits of your accusation on Radon?

>"Replit version had the same run button placement tho".

Seriously? Is this something to be expected from someone who claims to be an open-source evangelist? It seems like as soon as you received the email from Radon on his project, You sent it to your lawyers and asked them for few pointers to threaten this kid to take down a 'potential' competitor.

Besides, The funding related statements in your threat clearly motivates the reader to consider that you really don't have anything of legal merit to blame Radon of copying Replit.

P.S. We had a small exchange earlier last month[1] regarding your new cryptocurrency fund for small projects/startups, Which I eventually added to my curated list of startup tools after informing you. I'm removing that.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135573

No one is assuming anything. That's your email there where you bullied the guy. You could have been nice about it but instead you wanted to intimidate him by threatening to sue him. If you wanna make this right I think you should acknowledge that you overreacted and apologize to him.

> Now, a lot of people implicitly assume that in a dispute between for-profit company and an open-source project, the for-profit company must be in the wrong.

All things equal, this is not a baseless assumption; not only profit maximization vs. altruistic sharing are drastically different objective functions; a funded for-profit usually has more agency, including agency to play foul. This is not a crowd that is startup naive, people are familiar with the range of stuff that happens.

That said, you've explicitly intimidated the guy with the depth of your funding, then attacked their character despite the fact that you had tried to recruit him, so we are not even operating on assumptions here.

Now you'll have to waste some of that funding on PR consultation and damage control. A lose-lose for everyone.

Would you also like to share with the YC community that you were not alone in working on the idea of Replit while you were in Jordan. You might want to give Max some credit mate. Give credit where credit is due. Good luck with your endeavors.

Max Shawabkeh was one of the first engineers working on Repl.it and is hardly given any credit

This is a talk he gave back in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfxH-JDF7Xk&t=81s

https://replit.com/talk/ask/Who-is-Max-Shawabkeh/26386

Utterly appalling. It was only a matter of time when all this would catch up with you.

> a lot of people implicitly assume

Considering your existing cred, I'm sure many in the community would give you the benefit of the doubt if addressed the issue head-on and explained what was infringed instead of what reads as emotionally charged responses. And if you're holding out for legal reasons, I imagine that would make the community more outraged because it escalates an accidental bad faith incident into a intentional one.

If the author was maliciously crossing the ethical line, why they would show the project privately to you? If the author was not maliciously crossing the ethical line, why were you so quick to threaten legal action and bully them by mentioning that you had the money to make it dangerous for them?

So your proof that he copied a source code in the project is you saying that “if you are not convinced by my accusation which I didn’t prove, then stop reading because nothing will convince you”. have you missed logic class? no one told you before that the burden of proof is on the accuser?

> there is some line that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product

Depending on the severity of the offense and the circumstances this would make sense, but this was just a small project, not an entire VC-backed service. Would you be willing to provide concrete evidence to show that the intern was actually copying the specifics of your product? As it stands many of us are not convinced that this is the case. What are these "unique, invisible aspects" of Replit that you are referring to which are so integral to merit legal action from you? And do you believe it was justified against a project that was never even intended to be anything more than a hobbyist activity?

There's a big difference between hard-won technology (worthwhile protecting with patents, or trade secret law) and "this is how we designed this iteration of the project." Of course your implementation is secret (because it's closed source). That doesn't make it valuable enough to sue over, unless you want to be in the same camp as the asshats at Oracle / SCO.

If you didn't seriously consider obtaining patents for your efforts (and then decide to keep them as trade secrets, for whatever reason) then they're probably not valuable enough to jumpstart lawyers.

At the moment, I think you've done a fair amount of damage to your company's reputation. If I were on your board, we would be having some hard conversations right now.

this is disappointing behaviour. are there any alternatives to repl.it one can recommend? I don't want to use it anymore.

What is the specific legal accusation that you're making here? Contract violation? Copyright violation? Patent violation? Trade secret theft?

Ethical lines are not legally relevant.

Ugh. This is corporate authoritarianism at its most shameless.

Companies do not own someone’s expertise. This includes domain knowledge obtained in the course of their employment. If you wish to reserve the right to exploit an invention, patent it.

For everything else, I refer you to Intel vs NEC over the cloning of the 8086 (spoiler: Intel lost).

I wouldn't recommend attempting a rebuttal when you've just hit the top 30 HN posts of all time. Pretty much your best option is to apologize.

> I started working on Replit (or repl.it) back when I was a student in Jordan

How would you have felt, and where would you be today if Codeacademy had threatened to sue you instead of being nurturing to your project?

The "repl" part of Replit is open source. Your argument ends there. You can't take it back. I could literally fork your repo and I'd be "copying" you by your logic.

Ideon existed since 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20091214124037/http://ideone.com...

there is some line that it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product

I wonder how many YC startups came about from employees of a company failing to get buy-in from their employer about a better way to solve a problem and leaving to start their own company to do it. Many of those will surely have copied large aspects of their former employers' products, including the flaws.

Do you feel the same about Zoom's CEO and Jet.com's CEO?

with regard to ethics, two plausibly valid options:

either you believe that people should act ethically even if that means forgoing actions that they are legally allowed to make. if you believe that, isn't it wrong to build a free, open source competitor using all the knowledge you just got from working inside a company?

or:

you believe that business is the law of the jungle, and everyone is free to do whatever they can get away with legally. in which case why is it a problem for amasad to get lawyers involved?

it seems this dude's victimization relies on holding amasad to a higher standard of ethics than he holds himself. maybe he should because he has more money and power. or maybe not?

Hey dude. I understand things might be running a bit emotional for everyone right now. You might find it interesting that PG has written tangentially on this topic a few years ago. Might be an interesting take, given the distance in space/time.

http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html

> it's unethical to cross in copying a former employer's product (if you don't believe that, you can stop reading now, because no argument will convince you)

I've upvoted your comment for the value of your perspective and information about your own history with replit predating CodeAcademy, and I appreciate that lots of us feel protective of our ideas and the capacity to benefit from the work we put into executing on them.

But... "no argument will convince you?" While it's sometimes true that people hold positions they didn't reason themselves into and can't be reasoned out of, I've found "no argument will convince you" is often indicative of the fact that the speaker considers their position a prima facie reality, which is another way of saying they didn't reason themselves into it either, and therefore may also be underappreciating the merits of a countercase. Or, perhaps as common, they've abandoned the merits altogether and are attempting to narrate themselves or an audience through a lowering of status of those who disagree.

There are real questions about what a knowledge worker has a right to take with them after they leave, and you'd probably find lots of people are amenable to the idea that an employer has some legitimate claims. If it's true that this project "copied even unique, invisible aspects of Replit's architecture that I consider to be flaws" then maybe that might even persuade people if those don't look like natural decisions for the domain, appear to involve some novel problem solving, and/or weren't made public.

But the person on the other side of the argument:

(a) clearly didn't think they were doing anything they needed to hide from you

(b) has already outlined why they thought all their technical decisions were either not unique or influenced by things you'd made public when you made it clear you felt badly treated

(c) sure seemed to be making shows of good faith vs being met with threats of using capital to fund an aggressive legal response.

Those might be the reasons why many here are taking a critical posture (vs, say, reflexively siding with an open source project).

You may find you don't care if you can persuade those who disagree you. Sometimes that's a wise course. You may even exercise the privilege to take this to litigation. But if you really feel your opposition is in the wrong here and want to make a winning case either socially or legally then you're probably going to have to engage some of those points on a more compelling basis.

Fwiw this won't have happened (a similarly? designed copycat) if Replit's infrastructure was open source. A good example of this model is how GitLab still succeeds even if it is open source that other people are free to host.

sorry, do you seriously expect a student who trained at your company to not program the way you do? what do you think they are there for?

Fascinating! What flaws that existed in the architecture of Replit that existed in 2019 and persist to this day are still considered to be trade secrets worth pursuing legal remedies to keep secret?

I understand that you may not be able to describe the invisible long-term proprietary flaws for a number of possible reasons, but can you ballpark the number of these critical flaws that are the unique IP of replit? Or at least the relevant number of times when the code in this recent open source software overlapped with years-old mistakes in the Replit code base that are so crucial that they must be protected?

Edit: and just like that, threatened with legal action over my comment. Just like Radon I don't have the resources to fight a legal battle so I'm deleting my comment.

Amjad, don't worry about some of the HN crowd putting you down. When a non-compete agreement is signed, it must be honored. Some (not all) of these people are in my opinion, hypocritical and/or jealous and/or just plain evil. They want to see you go down.

If you must, issue an "apology" to appease these obnoxious folk. Unfortunately, that's how the world is nowadays.