Comment by catillac
5 years ago
“ Hey everyone, I want to apologize for the inappropriate use of power here. While I do believe there is an ethical line that was crossed here, I should have called him to understand his point of view and work it out. Which is what I'll try to do now, and see if we can get his project back up again. I'm sorry Radon. The lesson for me here is to internalize how I'm no longer the struggling kid from Jordan fighting for more than a decade to build something, and that I now have a responsibility towards our community and supporters to be kind and model better behavior. I'm sorry I let you down and I promise to do better in the future.”
Oh my, this is a classic poor response to this. Though you did apologize, which is good. You still are saying the intern is wrong, which isn’t good. This response may cause more issues than it solves.
> You still are saying the intern is wrong, which isn’t good.
That’s a good thing. That’s what happens when you have integrity. There is no reason to change his position on the subject of ex-employees making clones of the product.
> There is no reason to change his position on the subject of ex-employees making clones of the product.
Obviously I completely agree with this in a vacuum, but you seem to imply that that is what happened in this case. It was pretty clear from all the emails posted, assuming they were materially unaltered, that this isn’t what happened here. So your comment seems like a bit of a non sequitur, unless you’re saying that is what happened here?
I don’t see any reason why an ex-employee should expect a happy outcome when they create an open source “clone” of their employer’s product. Personally I have been in this situation as an ex-employee, where I was generally interested in the product field, and I avoided doing that to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and also to some degree, the copyright purity of the project would have been questionable and litigable.
A lot of people are very unclueful about this, especially young people, and maybe Mr. Masad could have had a gentler touch. But for the blogger to have cloned the product or part of it without (pinky swear!) actually taking any IP from the employer, that might in fact be legally true, but it’s a walk across a tightrope.
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I appreciate your diplomacy, but from my POV, GP is definitely trying to suggest the intern's actions were equivalent to founding a competing company, and is interested in defending REPL.it's CEO.
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I don't think he necessarily needed to say that - he can apologize for poor behavior without trying to reassert his moral/ethical stand in every public-facing comment (here, on Twitter).
Taking the analogy of the punch/stab example from one of the cousin comments above, it would be really strange for people to believe that because you apologized for retaliating the original act of getting punched was blameless.
Of course the analogy of physical violence is more explicit, less vague, less nuanced than the context of IP. If he wants to explain/assert his moral/philosophical ideas on IP, then it should be done separately in a more nuanced, detailed manner than what he's been doing all this while, which is acting out in retaliation of a seemingly small threat.
This also shows insecurity/weakness. He could have acted as/been the bigger person but gave up on it on every turn.
Cloning your previous employer's product doesn't seem illegal in California given the limitations on NDAs and very strong limitations on non-competes. Assuming no trade secrets or copyrighted information was used which would be easy to verify in an open source project. Merely having information about a company's internals in your head does not make it illegal to work for or start competitors.
And maybe that’s the answer here. Or maybe the legal and moral boundaries don’t coincide. But the facts of the case haven’t changed, so there’s no reason you’d expect any genuinely held opinion to have changed.