Comment by jcrites
5 years ago
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.
Happy to contribute as well, if a GoFundMe / some other crowd fund is set up.
OP, if you choose to bring the project back up, please reach out. I know some college professors who may be interested to be your first customers.
I'll happily contribute to a GoFundMe for the defense. I haven't made it through all of the comments, but I wonder if this isn't a case the EFF would be interested in.
I think the EFF is mainly interested in cases that are strong enough for a useful precedent to be set by fighting them
If I remember the timelines correctly before Cloud9 there was Nitrous.io. And before that (we’re talking circa 2007 now) the original Heroku was actually a hosted IDE.
People tend to forget that Heroku exists.
We may not have forgotten that Heroku exists, but we may have forgotten that Heroku was an IDE. At least, I wasn't aware of it. Are there old screenshots of what it looked like?
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Nitrous was action.io before that but it was like 2012, the company I confounded Codeanywhere, which was originally named PHPanywhere started in 2008.
Just some Cloud IDE history
> I was also considering working for your company when considering changing forms, but I never would after hearing about this episode.
Some personal reflection might be in order here before making harsh judgements. Your current employer (Facebook, according to your bio) has done far worse far many times, wouldn't you agree?