Comment by parafactual
5 years ago
Is it really "petty" if you are receiving dubious legal threats from a large corporation? Even if one is confident that they haven't, say, infringed IP, legal fees can be crippling.
It seems worse to keep quiet if you are being bullied by a well-known and respected person/entity more powerful than you.
yeah patent trolls and frivolous lawsuits are definitely a problem, but this doesn't really smell the same.
and i see your point, he seems to be within his rights to do this. even if i would be pretty irritated if someone ripped off my idea after working with me, it's problematic if he is being bullied from doing so.
i don't know how that extends to ethics though, which seems to be the theme of his post. either there's a moral code and i think he's shading the wrong side, or its the law of the jungle and then the ceo is free to use a lawsuit to stop him.
i think it's just the general sense of thirst and drama that i get from his blog and emails that make me think he's really after the publicity instead. which he has accomplished.
Maybe he wants to stand up to Replit/Amjad, and he realizes that if he doesn't make a scene and garner public support then he has no chance. That wouldn't mean that he's just in it for the publicity.
How else do you protect yourself against an entity with much more power and money than you?
overbroad patent trolls: yeah i agree
this case: build literally anything else except for the thing that he paid you to learn how it works.
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> i would be pretty irritated if someone ripped off my idea after working with me
Are you sure he really 'ripped off' anyone in the first place? The first thing I thought of when I read this article was 'that sure seems like the same thing Jupyter was made for'. A quick google shows that Jupyter was a couple years ahead of Repl.it, and I doubt that Jupyter was the first to come up with a web app REPL shell in the first place.
dude literally emailed the ceo and was like yeah i used this component, but what else could i have used, and yeah i used this other thing i learned about from working there but its popular! and i used yet another thing but you guys werent using it when i worked there.
im not saying any of this is illegal. just weird to copy your previous employer's tech stack, open source it, and try to play the victim and clickbait HN.