Comment by CheezeIt
5 years ago
> 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.
That you think “copyright purity” is the issue to litigate points out that you’re not very clueful either, I’m afraid. If I quit Google and write a clone search engine using none of their code but all of their technical architecture, in no way does that interact with Google’s copyrights. At all. You can’t copyright an indexing strategy nor a software architecture. You can, however, copyright a Visio diagram of the architecture. That’s a different thing.
This also applies to your nod toward “a novel fair use argument” in a sibling comment. Fair use has absolutely nothing to do with this or any hypothetical like it. You may as well have cited bird law.
Copyright isn’t the blanket IP concept people think would cover most disputes. These types of cases get into trade dress, patent law, and other legal concepts. The fundamental limits of copyright are why software techniques are patented in the first place and one reason among many why you sign assignment when you join a company.
IANAL and my comment is U.S. biased. At least in the U.S., the fixed and tangible aspects of copyright are bite-sized enough to understand without a J.D. Given how murky this entire field is when it comes to IP, it’s extremely important to understand these concepts for even a line engineer, as well.
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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.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a competing company or open source when it comes to the question of whether IP got stolen, unless you want to make a novel fair use argument.
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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.