So a CEO bullied you. He threatened to have lawyers look at something, accused you of behaving poorly, and accused you of being difficult. He is being manipulative. He is trying to guilt / scare you into stopping. And it worked.
For all readers... do not be afraid of lawyers. Especially if nobody has even talked to them yet. Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing agenda. Yet they also must do what their client asks, so lawyers looking into a concern, or even sending nastygrams... those are meaningless actions. It only becomes meaningful if and when if their lawyers indicate they believe they really have a case, or if your own lawyer believes they have a case. Everything before that is posturing and bullying.
If I were in the same situation as OP, I'd state that my intent was positive, ask to be informed of the results of discussions with attorneys, and wish them to have a nice day. Admit no wrong, make no apologies, ignore irrelevant statements (in particular personal attacks), and just let it slide until they take a real action of some kind.
Once they do take an action, then it might be appropriate to do what they want. But seriously... stop letting people be bullies.
Counterpoint: be afraid of lawyers. They may not be able to win s judgment against you, but they can easily bankrupt you. Remember the case where a man criticized Proctorio and was hit with a SLAPP lawsuit aimed to silence him. He ended up spending 100k on legal costs and the case is only beginning. He would have been bankrupt despite being 100% legally in the right.
Fortunately for him, EFF decided to support him afterwards. But do not count on EFF paying for your legal defence.
It goes both ways. Imagine Replit’s attorney going after OP. If OP didn’t take down the site, then suing them is going to be a huge expense & waste of time. Is Replit really gonna pay some corporate attorney $600-ish per hour to harass someone? You don’t even need a lawyer to show up in court and say “I’m a broke ass new grad, and these guys are trying to take down my website. I don’t even know why, but I’m dragging it out because I don’t like being bullied.” A good attorney would say “it costs nothing to demand we take this site down, but if the kid wants to fight us, do you really think it’ll be worth the effort? I’m expensive and this is not a threat to your business.” A bad attorney will just bleed Replit dry to accomplish very little.
If you sue me, I’ll just say “ok, see you in court, let me know if you need anything for discovery“. You’ll be spending lots of money and I’ll be spending nothing. It’s only expensive for me if I get an attorney, and I don’t need one. What happens if we go to court and lose? I have to take down my website? If there’s one lawyer in town, they drive a Chevrolet. If there’s two lawyers in town, they both drive Cadillacs.
Law suits cost both parties a whole truckload of money - replit almost certainly has a larger war chest than you and can outlast you.
It's easy to stand on the sidelines and criticize this person for not being a martyr to the cause of our terrible legal system - but, while such a lawsuit would never throw you out of your home, it could very quickly drain your personal savings which, if you have a family that's reliant on that savings for future education, could be devastating.
It is 100% reasonable and a good idea to reach out to the EFF if you're being cyber-bullied by a corp with an axe to grind, but standing on your own in this sort of a scenario is certainly going to inflict a fair bit of pain on the aggressor - but it's likely going to inflict a whole lot more pain on you. Lawsuits like this can be tied up in appeals essentially until we die of heat death given our legal system unless you get extremely likely.
Additionally I feel like you're making the assumption that the work a lawyer does is essentially busy work - discovery is an insanely expensive process to comply with and messing something up during discovery and accidentally deleting a key piece of evidence won't get you a "Well, you're just a rando - we'll let it slide" from the judge.
Lastly - if the trial actually did end up going to court, it's extremely likely you're going to lose without the assistance of a legal professional, US law is insanely complicated and I can almost guarantee that your current employer is breaking some law on a technicality currently, I have no idea what it is - but without legal council neither will you.
Florida allows you to keep your primary residence, regardless of value, even if there were criminal acts involved. Texas is less forgiving and does not indemnify your personal residence against criminal acts, but in exchange allows you to keep two horses.
Huh - I wonder if any texans have ever "smuggled" wealth through a bankruptcy by purchasing expensive stallions. Those can run up to 70 million (according to my google fu)
Two horses?! I can't tell if you're joking. I sincerely hope this is true. I'm imagining a sad Texas cowboy riding off into the sunset with just his two favorite mounts. "At least they didn't take mah horse!"
I googled "texas bankruptcy horses" and it seems a real thing, e.g. [1]:
Another good aspect of Texas bankruptcy code for farmers and ranchers is the specific delineations of property that are allowed to be kept during bankruptcy: 2 horses, mules or donkeys and a saddle, blanket and bridle for each, 12 head of cattle, 60 head of other types of livestock, 12 fowl and pets. If you’re a farmer or rancher considering bankruptcy, Chapter 12 could be a better option—a bankruptcy allowed specifically for the debts of a family farmer or fisherman.
Believe it or not a lot of people in Texas still live a rural lifestyle! There’s a lot more going on in the land outside the major cities than suburbs.
Pretty much every state has a bunch of random stuff that's protected. The list never really gets shorter since protecting types of property that statistically nobody has anymore doesn't generally cause issues.
It doesn't have to cost a truckload. You can spend a truckload on lawyers if you want, but realistically, what is the maximum damages that a judge would award if replit won this case? $1k? Maybe? I wouldn't be surprised if there were lawyers willing to defend this obvious case on a no win no fee basis.
what is the maximum damages that a judge would award if replit won this case? $1k? Maybe?
IMNAL, but with trade secrete theft I imagine the damages awarded could be whatever the other side is able to convince was the harm done. E.g. "... defendant open-sourced our trade secretes, which was forked by competitors, causing irreparable harm ... seeking $15MM in damages ... and legal fees, etc.."
It's not the visitors they are going to bring up in the court. The angle they push will probably be something along the lines of: the intern stole our intellectual property and put them out there on GitHub. There is no way we can put the cat back in the bag. As a result of this disclosure, we are suffering a financial loss of 100s of millions of dollars. Even if his website has 0 visitors, now thousands of people have access to our intellectual property and they collectively have a lot of visitors.
I mean, it's not like Anthony Levandowski put millions of self-driving cars in the streets and took business away from Waymo's self-driving cars. Just by copying Google's intellectual property, not even publishing it for the whole world to see, he committed an offence that cost 18 months in prison and more than 100 million dollars in fines.
Of course, this lawsuit may not have gotten that far, as it seems quite baseless. But it would have taken years of mental turmoil and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees for that to be established. And that is if the threat of the unfavourable outcome did not cause another tragedy like Aaron Swartz's.
Well, then I guess US and Canada's justice systems are non-working. Because that's not what will happen in practice. Also, there is a lot of legal work that needs to get done even before getting in front of a judge, and those can cost 100 ks on their own.
As far as I read the news and if it is true, then indeed I believe the US system is quite broken. Seems geared towards screwing over and bullying the poor.
Right, the “cat our of the bag” argument. Also similar to the ones used in the Napster, Torrent, eMule file-sharing persecutions whereby any forgettable film shared would instantly tally as a lost sale for each-and-every participant to the platform. :/
A guy making 30k a year got a reduced judgement of 2 million dollars against him for distributing copies of Nintendo Switch games on the basis that each download was a lost sale.
Only issue? The Nintendo Switch can't play copies of a game unless you painstakingly modify it.
So every person who visited his site had already decided not to purchase games and exploited gaps in Nintendo's DRM on their personal devices, yet our justice saw fit to permanently ruin him with the incredibly nonsensical argument Nintendo presented.
Our justice system is broken in more ways than are apparent.
I think you have way too much faith that a legal proceeding will reveal the "truth" about your intentions and actions. It's about competing narratives and interpretations of "facts".
If it goes to a legal proceeding, it is about convincing a stranger and lay-person (i.e. Judge, or perhaps even worse a group of jurors), that you didn't violate the law. You have to do this while the other side is doing their very best to convince the same stranger that you are a devious thief who did irreparable harm to their company and cost them millions in damages (or some other absurdly large number). They will paint everything you did and say as part of your plan to steal from and damage their company. They will have highly qualified experts submit very convincing reports, and testify, that what you did was trade secrete theft, and caused immense damage. Your only defense will be to push your own narrative that can counter all of this, sufficiently to get you off the hook. You'll need at least a lawyer, perhaps experts of your own, and all the cost that this entails. This will be a big deal to your life, but will be a business expense (i.e. before taxes) for the company suing you.
Of course you get a lawyer before it goes to court. However you can do the first round without a lawyer. Just a simple letter saying you dispute a claim is enough in some cases to tell the others you are serious. If you get a response after that, then find a lawyer.
You could probably get a response letter drawn up probono by the EFF for the initial claim - but honestly that response letter would likely cost you less than 100$ to have drawn up by a lawyer which is likely a more valuable way for you to spend your time to make sure everything is perfect.
Possibly? But I'd primarily say IANAL and you're best off spending the fifty bucks to get a half hour of some lawyer's time on the phone.
A while ago I needed to briefly retain a lawyer to navigate a complex contract with my employer, there may be terrible lawyers out there but the person I reached out to was exceedingly thorough in explaining things (and I, as a dev, had lots of rules-lawyery questions to throw at them), quite prompt in their response and charged a modest fee.
Speaking to a lawyer will absolutely cost you more than a coffee, but it's not that pricey in the scheme of things compared to getting in legal hot water.
Reply: "Thank you for your letter. I am awaiting your writ." Say nothing else.
Without a writ, you have little idea what the substance of their legal claim is; there's no purpose in hiring an attorney, because there's nothing for him to work on. So you are saying: "I don't fold to hollow threats and bullying. If you have a proper legal claim, make a proper legal claim."
If you then get a writ, show it to a lawyer.
If you have no substantial assets, it might be worth pointing that out (once the writ arrives). Nobody wants to sue a man of straw.
Ignoring is in general the worst thing you can do, if they do anything more it looks bad on you in court.
I do agree with those who say get a lawyer to send your response. However you should still do the research yourself - to the best of your ability. You can save yourself some expensive lawyer time by knowing the basics and having a potential draft (be careful: make it clear that you do not have any emotional ties to it so the lawyer is free to tear it up) of your response.
>> It goes both ways. Imagine Replit’s attorney going after OP. If OP didn’t take down the site, then suing them is going to be a huge expense & waste of time. Is Replit really gonna pay some corporate attorney $600-ish per hour to harass someone? You don’t even need a lawyer to show up in court and say “I’m a broke ass new grad, and these guys are trying to take down my website. I don’t even know why, but I’m dragging it out because I don’t like being bullied.”
You are really underestimating how petty a lot of people are. I was sued for way less than this and the company suing me stood to gain nothing. Companies often have lawyers on retainer for this reason.
You also underestimate the massive stress a lawsuit entails.
John Oliver is actually a really good source for this sort of point as he dedicated an episode[1] to the trials and tribulations of his lawsuit against Murray Energy - something he described as a SLAPP suit which I think is a fair viewpoint.
The replit case is especially interesting since it could be a lot more personal (because the dev behind it previously worked for them and people hold grudges) and also because it might actually be a lot more valid then a lot of other frivolous C&Ds we see (since they were a former employee and it would be impossible to claim they were unaware of how replit worked at a very basic level). I think this lawsuit is a lot riskier than most and replit certainly does have a leg to stand on in open court.
This is dangerous advice if the lawyer fees get paid by the loser of the suit like they do in some cases. ianal but i'd look into that before taking this tactic.
In the US it’s way more complicated than that, and not just because there are 50 states that all have their own laws on whether or not the prevailing party can recover costs and it furthermore depends on the specific action.
FALSE! FALSE FALSE FALSE! There are many, many circumstances in the US where the loser has to pay costs and attorneys fees. Like copyright infringement. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#505
TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE! there is no "loser pays costs" rule/law for the entire US. it is a case by case thing, determined by a judge, in most cases, even in copyright cases. the link you posted even says that.
the comment you replied to was saying that there is no nation-wide law protecting victims of unnecessary or unjust lawsuits, and there isn't. you simply cannot count on getting your costs paid for if you win in any case.
The attorney is bound to act in their client's best interest. A bad lawyer might do that, but a good lawyer will indeed tell their client when something isn't worth the cost, despite their own financial interest.
Some people enjoy harassing other people with lawyers. Saying it’s not in their interest is meaningless when someone is willing to spend 100k on a neighborhood fence dispute.
The costs for replit isn’t the same as the costs for an individual. For a corporation the cost is already budgeted in and pre-taxes so why do they care?
To be honest though - replit is still going to pay significantly more in legal fees than the individual. That all said they almost certainly bear that cost while the individual may not be able to do so.
By the time the threat is out, the PR damage is already impeding (see: this thread). And spending a few thousand dollar is simply not going to hurt a large corporation as much as it hurts an individual. By the way, this is similar for time: A large corporation sends a mail to the legal department and the case is taken care of. You need to find a lawyer, find the money, collect the evidence ...
If a client insists there was trade secrete theft, a good attorney would do their very best to argue this case and seek legal remedies. Most attorneys, being non-technical, would have to rely on experts to outline exactly what/how a trade secrete theft occurred.
Did you read any of the stories what a tech company did to an employee who complained about safety issues at the plant? Tried to get him SWATted up by lying to the police. People are extremely petty, and just because people have well paid jobs doesn't mean they are reasonable in any way.
Being an attorney does not give you the power to automatically bankrupt someone, just like owning a gun doesn’t mean you can point it at people and automatically get them to do what you want. Picking a frivolous fight with the wrong person can go very poorly for you.
I guess the main point I’m trying to say that one doesn’t have to fold the second someone threatens you with legal action, even if you don’t have an attorney. A porcupine doesn’t automatically shed all its quills and throw themselves in a mountain lion’s mouth as soon as the mountain lion eyeballs it with a hungry look. You can f*!with people who f* with you. They may just go away when they realize you’re not going to make it easy for them.
The kid who posted this website could get a notarized affidavit saying he didn’t steal any IP, here’s how he got all the stuff, provide links to all the publicly available information, that he simply state that he built a hacky weekend project I good faith, and that no matter how much they pursued him or time they wasted on him, it wouldn’t change the facts of the case. The more time the attorneys spend going after him, the more they’re just gonna waste their own time and look super dumb. Say they are free to pursue whatever legal action they want, just like you’re free to stand up to a frivolous, insecure bully with too much money and free time. Take all the fun out of it for them, don’t roll over and take it because you’re afraid of being potentially bankrupted.
> The kid who posted this website could get a notarized affidavit saying ...
Sure. He could. It would mean absolutely nothing, but he could.
> Say they are free to pursue whatever legal action they want, just like you’re free to stand up to a frivolous, insecure bully with too much money and free time.
Great. Are you going to pay for it? (And pay for it when he loses since it isn't even slightly frivolous?)
A drawn out legal case can bankrupt you not only financially but mentally, too.
The quantity and the length of emails sent by the author, in addition to the writeup, suggest they spent considerable time worrying about the situation.
And it’s only been a few days. Imagine if this becomes a multi-year case.
I don't really know how the civil trial works in the US, but in my country you are not required to participate to the process and thus have a lawyer (while it's required for a penal trial). You can decide to not defend yourself, that doesn't means that the other party wins, but that you don't take part in the process, and thus it's only the accusation that can provide proofs and similar things, and then the judge decides.
In that case, I wouldn't even bother to try to defend myself, if he doesn't have any proof that something is copied as it seems, no way he will win. Worse case scenario and you are guilty, fine, you will have to take down your project? You will have to pay a compensation? How much can this be quantified? 100$? 1000$? I don't think more than that. And if you refuse to pay? They have to do another trial just to have your money. In the end, they will end up spending a lot of money and maybe in 10 years they hope to get something back (most probably nothing).
In the US, if you don't show up, you lose by default. Sometimes you can get that default judgement vacated if you show up later, but only if you can show good a good reason, such as you weren't aware of the case because the plantiff did not properly serve notice, etc.
Not just the lawyers, but future employers as well.
It doesn't matter what the value proposition was, this will be a stain on his name "the guy who open sources the stuff he likes in our design/projects"
How does this even work? If someone sues me, but they have no case, and I’m not interested, why would I even defend myself. Even presenting no evidence the judge would rule in my favour.
If you fail to appear for a court proceeding, the judge will decide in favor of the plaintiff (the person suing you):
> Default judgment is a binding judgment in favor of either party based on some failure to take action by the other party. Most often, it is a judgment in favor of a plaintiff when the defendant has not responded to a summons or has failed to appear before a court of law. The failure to take action is the default. The default judgment is the relief requested in the party's original petition.
> He would have been bankrupt despite being 100% legally in the right. Fortunately for him, EFF decided to support him afterwards. But do not count on EFF paying for your legal defence.
Why? If you are 100% legally in the right then why wouldn't an entity with sufficient resources whose agenda is in line with that of yours support you? They will get all the expenses compensated after you+they win, won't they?
The loser only pays the winner's legal fees when required [1].
I'm not a lawyer but iiuc as long as you file in one of 21 states [2] you shouldn't expect to have to payout for making a pointless lawsuit.
Anecdotally, there were a lot of lawsuits claiming fraud & etc in the recent US president elections and I haven't heard of a single case where they had to pay for losing them.
As much as I also hate the idea of giving in to legal threats/bullying, I don't think this is very good advice.
Lawyers may not like losing cases, but they like billable hours even more. So as long as their client is paying, they will follow their wishes as best they can.
Even "meaningless actions" such as "cease and desist" letters or "demand" letters probably need consultation with a lawyer for a proper response. This "admit no wrong" advice can actually be tricky. What may seem like an innocent or innocuous comment could make your situation worse.
By the time you have an actual civil action against you, you may have missed the opportunity to end the matter without getting to this point.
If you're unable to pay for it, you will not receive justice.
I am aware that this is not the 1950's superman definition of justice. It is the "welcome to America" version of justice, that you often can't even get if you can pay for it, depending on who you are.
So, you pick that fight. I've got a family and a life I need to protect; I'll stand on the sidelines and watch, thank you very much.
> I am aware that this is not the 1950's superman definition of justice. It is the "welcome to America" version of justice, that you often can't even get if you can pay for it, depending on who you are.
> Be that as it may, it likewise does no one any good to pretend it has any connection to justice.
...because someone on HN is going to be confused by the witty criticism of justice, and experience actual moral or intellectual confusion? Does this not strike you as linguistic pedantry?
I don't think that's quite fair since the US justice system does allow for and has come to include advocacy organizations like the EFF and NAACP, and, even without those organizations usually individuals will end up paying significantly less for the same legal services (since most lawyers do have morals and will try and make their services affordable to less well off clients).
But... other than those allowances... Yea, money is pretty important in the US justice system.
I mean... those are organisations that are support a collective ideal.
People that buy into that ideal fund those organisations so they can provide legal support to enact those principles.
The existence of those organisations (or pro bono work) is not a counterpoint to the premise that the US justice system is predicated upon money (and the implied corrolary that the level of justice you receive is proportional to the amount you pay for it).
(having said that, I don't necessarily agree with the flippant comment that you are replying to, but still).
Because it’s not North Korea’s government? You say that as if organizing and running a beneficent and just government is a trivial matter. People are evil and despotic, and every government is full of people.
>You say that as if organizing and running a beneficent and just government is a trivial matter.
Not really. The things this country has done since its inception are deplorable, and yet we have people in this country that want to prevent people from learning more accurate history to keep fake, nationalist "patriotism" at an all time high. They want the system to be cruel and hurtful. What is there in America to even be proud of nowadays?
I appreciate the sentiment here, but this strikes me as very dangerous advice, especially framed as a blanket rule. Even more so when dealing with someone who has presumably far greater resources.
There's no way you can know what this person's legal exposure might be without seeing their employment contract. They may well be completely in the right and this CEO is all bluster, but it's unequivocally bad advice to suggest that there's nothing to be concerned about based on the information you have.
Even beyond that, I've (unfortunately) known companies that were entirely willing to dump money into lawsuits they knew they had no hope of winning just to set the precedent that you should not cross them or they'll bury you in legal expenses.
In the end your advice may be exactly right, but it's definitely not reasonable to make these kinds of blanket assumptions.
I was on the jury for a civil real estate case that was rather open and shut from the jury's point of view. Maximum damages awarded would have been in the 5 figures. It was on the docket for 4 years.
In the context of the article I took that as a gesture of goodwill while trying to talk out the misunderstanding. They had a relationship before this happened and it sounded like he wanted to maintain that relationship.
In the end, this was a hobby project for the author, and I can understand he might not want to deal with the stress involved with possible legislation. The bully is the aggressor here and lets try not to blame the victim.
I'm still hoping the CEO will come out of the woods with something like: "I'm sorry, I had a shitty day and acted like an ass." But that might be more grown-up than is realistic...
That's true, but there is no legal backing behind a laywer-initiated nastygram, so why fold before it even gets to that point?
It's true, the US legal system can be hopelessly expensive, but it is still possible to push back before it gets to that point if you're sure you're in the right.
.. doing an open source project that does what a bunch of other sites are doing to some extent. It looks like he was about a week into it. Choose your battles. I'm guessing this really isn't a big ambition for this guy, but he probably wanted to flesh-out the concept for his own satisfaction having not gotten that far during his internship. That motivation is not new to me, but I think standing down and moving on to some other interest was probably a good idea. Now he's blogging about it instead.
I actually really appreciate that he wrote this post:
1. What if I'm considering working for Replit? This behaviour would give me second thoughts.
2. Imagine I'm a VC firm deciding whether or not to invest in them. I don't want me money being used to pursue a frivolous lawsuit against a website that isn't a commercial threat and probably isn't using their IP anyway.
Eh, personally I appreciate the blog. It's good to know who to avoid in the industry, and the accusation about trade secrets seems way overblown and egotistical. It's not that hard to figure out how to run a container when you push a button, or else said sites wouldn't be so common.
So based on those tweets, I suspect the following scenario is a possibility, or was perceived as a possibility by Amjad:
Radon interned at repl.it and asked a lot of questions. To be clear, asking a lot of questions is a good thing for career development in that it results in learning a ton, and typically something you definitely want your full-time employees to do, but not necessarily what you're expecting from an internship/temp worker arrangement.
Amjad apparently had some awareness of Radon being a particularly curious intern. Again, nothing wrong with that!
Radon then published an open-source hobby project which seemed to build on many of the teachings from repl.it. Based on what we can see of the discussion, it's likely that Radon wouldn't have had the exposure to the problem domain in order to build the solution he did, as fast as he did, had he not spent time at repl.it and asked a lot of questions.
Radon then showed this to Amjad, and as all of the above dawned on Amjad, he reacted incredibly poorly. The analogy he's using in his tweets ("someone goes into your house and steals from you, even if it's not material") suggests he's likening it to inviting a friend over to a dinner party at your mansion, having the guest ask a bunch of questions about the design, excuse themselves to use the restroom, and poke around in all the closets along the way. Next week they invite you over to the 1-bedroom flat that they regularly livestream from, and you see they've applied lessons they learned while asking questions and wandering around your place, to their interior design.
You don't feel robbed, but you may certainly feel a bit slighted. If you're a private person you might be a bit miffed about how your years of hard work has been distilled into something more spartan and put on display for others to copy.
Even if I think Amjad's response was quite over the top, I do think it's fair to be a bit surprised to learn that your guest spent a significant portion of their visit poking around in your closets instead of focusing on the dinner company. In the context of an internship, it comes across as mildly jarring to point out that you were actually just after interior design lessons rather than enjoying dinner for the sake of dinner.
I'm not proposing this is in reality close to what happened; Radon seems highly motivated and prolific, and was probably an amazing intern. I also don't think he did anything legally in the wrong, even if unconventional and potentially offensive.
Amjad's reaction was totally inappropriate, but based on his tweets there is at least some reason to the rhyme.
I follow your line of thinking, but what's missing from it is that repl.it isn't unique at it's core. There are a ton of "multi language repls", many of which existed before repl.it, before Amjad's jsConsole, etc.
What repl.it is doing that is unique is the amount of investment into all of the "extra" stuff around it.
The "number of languages" thing isn't secret sauce either...clearly once you have the base repl working, iterating more languages is pretty straightforward.
Which is extremely wise advice honestly. This lawsuit is a bit muddled and less clear cut than folks have been portraying it. Speaking out in a forum like this may salve your pride but it isn't going to result in absolutely anything that's helpful legally - it can cause only harm.
(And honestly - most HNers would just take the opportunity to bash him if he showed his face, so for his mental health as well I am happy he's keeping to the shadows)
While studying fine art I built a site that was intended to experiment with disrupting advertising by picking on a bullshit pseudo-scientific term, "bifidus digestivum", used by the company Danone as the live ingredient in their yoghurts, and ranking highly for that term on Google - it eventually got to the number 1 spot. Danone's legal team got in touch and we danced around each other for a bit. It was clear that the original domain used their trademark and that would be enforceable in court, so I gave that to them a couple of weeks after setting up a new domain that wasn't just their trademark and redirecting all the traffic until Google caught up with the move: https://whatisbifidusregularis.org/ (They'd changed the magic ingredient's name by that point, partially because of the ridicule the initial name provoked). I replied to their emails addressing their points - no, I was not making any money from it so there's no commercial harm, I was just laying out the facts so there was no defamation etc. and after two or three bits of back-and-forth they went away. The site's had something like 500,000 visits since I built it in the late 2000s, which isn't a lot in the large scheme of things, but I hope it helped people who wondered whether it was bullshit know that it was bullshit.
I'm speaking from a UK perspective, so perhaps in the US it's different. While ignoring lawyers is stupid, waiting until they actually get in touch and looking at the merits of their case is not stupid, as the parent comment says. Then if they seem minded to pursue it anyway then fine, back down. But companies don't want to spend loads of money suing someone with no money either. The people who really lose are the people who entirely ignore the lawyers or are determined to take a case to court when they don't have the money for it out of some misplaced sense of righteousness.
You don't have contact information listed in your profile. I posted a comment in this thread offering to pay for your legal fees (and many people, upon seeing my comment, contacted me offering to help). It'd be helpful if you could publish your contact info in your HN profile too.
You can ignore the stuff from the CEO, yes. But once you get a letter from a lawyer you should at least have a lawyer look it over and possibly draft a response.
It can sometimes hard to tell frivolous vs. serious letters, and ignoring a serious one is not a good idea. Given any sort of emotional attachment to your business, and lack of legal experience, you might not be the best person to judge the situation.
What? Failure to heed a legal threat can result in a lawsuit. Failure to appear can result in a default judgement against you. Appearing in court without adequate representation isn't much safer. Appearing with adequate representation is probably out of OP's budget.
The point is that aggressive litigation is a common tactic large companies use to bully smaller players, because they know that the smaller players don't have the resources for extended legal battles.
I already cancelled my subscription for the hacker plan on Replit, I not going to support a bully. Also, I expect people to upload mirrors of riju the same way they did with youtube-dl when Github decided to take it down.
It seemed obvious the OP had some loose threads or lack of confidence in his positioning. A hard "no" only applies if you know you're right. If, on the other hand, you're hearing confusing, well-articulated words, from important people, caution nearly always is rewarded. Let them play their cards (if they will) and then afterward fully informed with whatever advice you choose to seek, decide whether to resurrect the project.
The OP doesn't have an operating business, he can decide to put it on hiatus, as a resulting of bullying or for any other reason.
Love this comment and support it 100%. I think what the OP tried to express and not everyone might have picked up on: there's usually a step between where this case is at right now and a lawsuit being officially filed - that step would be a cease and desist letter. In it, the company (aka, their lawyer) would state the basis for their claims and would make a clear case for why they think they are entitled to those claims. At that point, you'd have a better idea if you're being bullied or if they have a case. IANAL so take this all with a grain of salt, but it would be unusual for a claimant to optimize for taking you to court over optimizing for actually resolving the case. The latter can be achieved at a fraction of the time and cost with a cease and desist letter, so that's where that step comes from. The downside is that the letter could be officially registered and could become a public record, which you would have to proactively disclose in your interactions with current and future investors.
Even if they get paid in advance, lawyers are acutely aware of the costs of litigation (even when you ultimately win) and that losing cases is one of the most common triggers for lawyers being sued, so, they really don't like losing cases even if they are getting paid. (There are caveats and exceptions, sure, but as a broad rule...)
Successful legal or medical malpractice suits are rare, and there's insurance for that. All law firms are a little profligate and will have their own internal calculus as to how much to push the client.
Dropping a case or settling a case is not the same as losing a case. There is quite a lot of legal pressure and financial cost that can be applied that puts you at no risk of losing a case.
I agree. One of the things the judge is going to ask both parties is if there were any attempts to resolve this issue in good faith outside of court. If you show up penniless with no lawyer, and they show up with a high end legal team to show off punitive damages and the only dealbreaker is that the little guy won't sit down and die quietly; you're in pretty good shape.
The judge will tell you all to go away and try to find an agreement. This agreement will either be Replit leaving you alone or Replit buying you out.
IANAL, but I was in a similar situation and I cannot see any circumstance where you get raked over the coals.
Not quite - if your lawyer believes they have a case, especially a strong case, there is quite likely a good opportunity to settle out of court and the other side's lawyers (acting in their own client's best interest) will go out of their way to try and encourage them to accept a reasonable settlement.
You're only boned if it actually goes to court - and even in that case you're still free to settle until the judge announces a verdict.
Is not too difficult to find a decent employment or IP lawyer to spend an hour with you for a few hundred dollars to go over a document and advise you on how to respond.
And that's sorta the rub - these costs are all really reasonable to anyone who's been working a white collar job for a few years, but it can be hard to afford for new employees and people in poverty.
Thankfully there are organizations that will take up your legal fight for free in the US.
> Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing agenda.
Most lawyers don't care since they are getting paid anyway.
And something like a website that could be easily transferred into another jurisdiction or throw-away company? Good luck. This is not real estate where you are a sitting duck.
Many attorneys offer free consultations, so OP (or anyone in a similar situation) should've contacted an attorney and asked them what to do. The attorney would know very well if he was in actual danger or the CEO was just bluffing.
I would expect the free consultation to be "Hmm, that depends. Can you give me a copy of any contracts you signed with them? Oh and $$$. Send me $$$ too."
Have you tried? I've got good 30min conversations with lawyers on the phone for 0$, and them telling me I didn't need their services after all, but to call them if X happens. Same with many other professionals, FWIW.
Yep that's been my experience too (UK lawyers). A few emails, a quick look at my contract (client was in breach by terminating without notice). The lawyers explained exactly what the legal situation was and told me that I would probably win an amount slightly less than their fee and they recommended I didn't bother - totally free advice.
(Annoyingly the reason I wouldn't have won that much in damages was that I had mitigated my damages by finding another contract within days)
My concern is that determining whether or not they are needed could be a lengthy task. I'm not saying that most of them would lie and say it would take longer than that.
Most professionals are pretty reasonable if you don't actually need their services. From handymen to lawyers, I've had people tell me I don't actually need them.
I mean I've also suggested at no cost that a site could be built on Squarespace instead of hiring a software engineer too...
I briefly used a lawyer in the states and the cost was extremely reasonable - in Canada I've used one much more and the cost continues to be quite reasonable.
I think this impression is just a result of how lawyers are portrayed in the media, most folks are quite happy to sit down with someone and talk something through - moreso if it can be done entirely over email or the phone.
Well, the US News coverage and TV made being really afraid of lawyers the norm. Especially when you are poor. In the countries in the EU where I lived, I do not even have to open the threat email, but if I lived in the US, I would be very afraid. No idea if that is true or not but the system seems geared for bullying the little guy over there.
No, you absolutely should be afraid of lawyers. They can waste boundless amounts of time and money over bullshit nobody else cares about. In many cases lawsuits are nothing but state-sanctioned bullying and extortion. Nobody sane actually wants to waste their time and money going to court over any minor thing, only corporations can afford to do this because they have more than enough money to burn. Suing competitors into oblivion is a viable tactic even if you lose in court because it delays their profits and burns their cash reserves. Sony vs. Connectix is an example of this.
Obviously the right thing to do is to stand up to this bullshit. I have massive respect for anyone with the balls to do that. Everyone else is better off doing things as anonymously as possible. Can't sue you if nobody knows who you are.
In terms of legal liability, it would be a lot harder for Amjad Masad to prove damages from this post versus the webapp. Especially since Masad's emails are there in plain site. It's sad riju is offline, but at least there's a record that it happened. Putting ethics aside, I think this move reduces financial risk at least.
But this situation is terrible. I've seen multiple YC CEOs bring out the fancy lawyers that they got connected to through the incubator. In some cases, these were multi-million dollar arguments that really arose because the YC CEO screwed up (in very very basic ways!) and then the they got butthurt when things didn't go their way. And YC is connected with they very kinds of lawyers who are happy to make money off of bullying their way through "deals."
Why does YC keep funding CEOs who get their egos bruised so easily? If you're a CEO and you're using your legal leverage irresponsibly, just imagine what the company books must look like.
I have received a few 'love letters' from lawyers and a few company CEOs.
It is scary but first few times but don't forget it will cost them money to take you to court. So ask yourself: Will it cost them more money to sue you than they will save?
In this case will it would cost them stupid amount of money to swat down every person like you.
P.S. I looked at using them but 'loved' totally transparent demo.
In this case I believe OP was trying to salvage their relationship. I would also like to note that OP does not seem to be operating on fear, hence the public disclosure.
A fancy funded company like Replit getting scared by an intern's weekend project is entertaining. If your moat is so low it can be replicated in a few days, I think this open source project is the least of their worries.
They offered to hire him before insinuating he was a bad/demanding intern, as well. This is standard manipulative behavior and has little benefit to anyone besides attempting to make the intern feel bad. This isn't the first time I've seen a founder resort to this exact type of behavior before threatening legal action.
That's why I'm glad the OP spoke up. Abusive behavior like this shouldn't be tolerated in the industry and is sadly common. Now I know to avoid this company and individual.
Who would want to use replit after reading that? They might have just killed their company. All it would really take is for this guy to put his site back up and add shared links.
The other day, someone mentioned avoiding Chinese products and I argued it is not an easy thing to do. But sites like these? Easy decision. After this circus/drama, this site goes into my don't even visit the URL list. What a shitty behavior.
I would play devil's advocate here and say that the situation is probably muddier than it is presented in the blog. Also there appers to be a level of trust here (at least the Replit CEO trusted that OP will not make this go viral on HN and spiral into a PR nightmare I suppose, which though is the most entertaining path it can take)
Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
Nothing worse than petty threats in corporate speak. He must be serious since he was planning to engage with his lawyers rather than just circle back with them.
> Also there appers to be a level of trust here (at least the Replit CEO trusted that OP will not make this go viral on HN and spiral into a PR nightmare I suppose, which though is the most entertaining path it can take)
I don’t get what you’re saying here. It’s not a breach of trust to speak publicly about someone threatening legal action against you.
Rather than downvoting your comment I opted to reply to it since it may provide a bit more information for you to base your judgement on about "things being muddier".
As for your last comment about their abilities - forgive me but that sounds incredibly unfair and unwarranted and verges on being a personal attack.
Interesting. Now I think it really might be a (accidental) white box clone. A lot of stuff looks obvious in hindsight, especially if it is the best solution to the problem.
But then I believe this is legal (depending on your jurisdiction).
Amjad, replit's CEO, offered to hire OP, later accused them of copying their "internal designs", then threatened them with lawyers replit's millions can buy, eventually to stonewall and stop replying to their emails. What kind of trust is that?
> Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
That's a valid perspective, alright. One that's minority I sincerely hope.
I'm pretty skeptical. I think a rational actor wouldn't have made legal threats. Even if OP's project does somehow use some secret insight from replit, it's certainly not a threat to replit's business in any way. Legal action would be a waste of time, money, and PR.
Which means that the legal threats levelled against OP are presumably coming from a place of emotion and personal resentment, and I'm very much not prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt to replit under those circumstances.
CEOs get very invested in their projects. It's pretty much expected. It's their entire life. Many of them have invested everything into their companies, and are terrified of failures (there's an awful lot of FAIL out there).
Different Principals have different ways of evaluating threats, and reacting to them. At first glance, this seems like an awful mistake, on the part of the Replit people (Can you say "own goal"? I knew you could!).
Maybe there's more to the tale than appears here, but it does seem fairly straightforward; assuming that the emails shared tell the whole story.
I hope that everyone finds a way past this, and comes out OK.
One thing that I will say, is that the OP seems to be pretty sharp. He's young, and maybe he reacted more quickly and naively than a cynical old bastard like Yours Truly would, but he has done a pretty cool job on his project. It might not be "ship-ready," but it sounds like a great demonstration of his capabilities.
Also, as Elon Musk shows, CEOs can cause tremendous damage, if they go off-script. Being a CEO of a public/funded company is a fairly awesome Responsibility. It needs to be taken seriously.
I'd say that this very thread shows the damage that can be done to the company. Having this pinned at #1 on HN for all this time is devastating. It's actually kind of horrifying. Like watching a slow-motion train wreck. A lot of Replit employees and VCs are going to take it in the shorts from this. He's probably got some 'splainin' to do...
I can't remember the company, but there's a famous object lesson of a UK CEO that destroyed his life's work and corporation, by mentioning an upcoming product too early in a BBC interview.
I've encountered the irrational over invested founders first hand at a previous company. I worked there for about 6 months but it didn't really suit me so I moved on.
The founders seemed to get upset, I still don't really know why, presumably because of the short tenure. They then proceeded to not pay me my last month's wages while attempting to feed me various excuses or just failing to reply to messages.
I eventually got the case in front of a judge (self represented) and discovered that despite them telling me about their lawyers they were also representing the case themselves without any idea about the legal situation. The judge basically laughed them out of court, starting off by pointing out that even if all of their statements were correct they still had no legal basis for not paying the wages. The judge then checked their accusations (that I had lied to them during the hiring process) and found they were not correct.
Despite them having no legal basis the whole process was pretty stressful since until the court case I had been assuming they had some reason to not just settle. (I was mostly worried the recruiter had done something genuinely dodgy during the hiring process.)
I'm still surprised that those people can run a company for more than 5 years.
Yeah, people aren't rational. But when people start behaving dangerously (making legal threats, etc), I think they ought to be acting rationally — especially if they're in a position of power.
So when a CEO makes legal threats against some random dev's side project, seemingly out of a sense of entitlement to the very idea of a polyglot code sandbox, I'm going to be pretty harsh.
What exactly are you skeptical about? It's read to me like you were disbelieving the story because you didn't believe the CEO would act that way. To the contrary, it's entirely plausible (regardless of truth).
We can completely agree that people ought to be behaving more rationally, but empirically in enough cases, they don't.
I'm skeptical that "the situation is muddier than it appears in the blog post." It seems clear to me that the CEO is acting irrationally, and given that, nothing about the story seems out-of-place. So I'm going to be pretty harsh towards the CEO in not extending them the benefit of the doubt, because I don't see any perspective where they're behaving appropriately.
I don't think anyone who doesn't work for you has any obligation whatsoever to consider your image. As a CEO and public face of a company you should go ahead and assume that anyone you threaten or badmouth will go ahead and talk about it online, on the news, or with a bullhorn at the local mall.
He willingly traded some percentage chance at a competitor using an open source project to steal some percentage of his business for this PR nightmare. Personally I think this effort shows the bar for such a project is pretty low so I don't think shutting it down was a good trade off. I think it shows immaturity, bad will, bad faith and honestly its more of a case study in whom not to work for. Most people they would want to hire are liable to have multiple options. They can ill afford to be an undesirable choice.
Based on the commit log in the article, he added support for running code in 79 programming languages in 4 days. I'd say he's probably pretty talented.
It's not the whole picture, but the article links to the full email exchange. It's difficult for me to imagine what missing information would lead to the CEO's messages being appropriate.
My understanding based on the blog post was that it was cautionary due to the threat of legal action. It seems clear that there isn't any doubt - it's caution due to the stakes.
When faced with an irrational actor making legal threats the rational choice might well be to back down even if you're 100% in the right but your loss from backing down is minor, so it tells us nothing.
Talent or not, having the passion to put together a crazy project like this that has no real practical use but is very interesting - I would want to hire that person over someone with a bit more skill.
I don't think this is true. As the author notes, he doesn't have any ability to scale due to simplistic design decisions he made. As the author notes, the hard part of this business is not "write a webserver that takes a program from a user and runs it"
Yeah, the entire premise of this kind of company is asking strangers to give you arbitrary code and then running it. I imagine there ares some important design decisions there that are not trivial to replicate. At it seems the author made _no_ attempt to replicate them, as he said anyone could knock his server over easily w/ a fork bomb.
I thought these type of interpreters ran in the user's browser. Cross-compile the interpreter to JS or webasm, stream it to the user after they click on which language to use. Built-in libraries could be streamed on-demand the same way or they can be bundled with the interpreter. It would solve the scalability and security problem.
Even so, the fact that Repl.it felt so threatened by it as to threaten legal action and bully someone into taking it down speaks volumes to its viability as a competitor. The inability to scale can be fixed - probably not trivially, obviously, but it's very much a possibility.
Or it speaks to Repl.it's CEO's lack of understanding of the technical differences. I wouldn't assume anything about the viability based on this reaction.
They should feel threatened. There's nothing particularly special or novel about what Repl.it is doing, also very little in the way of specialised knowledge required to build a competitor (note that I'm not trying to belittle the individual involved here). That they got $20 million to pursue this product in some ways surprises me given the relatively low barrier to entry.
If the code is well-documented and everything is nicely set up, you just need the right person who has access to VC and an untapped market (e.g. China) to pick it up and spin off from there
Or at least it would save up a lot of boostrapping cost. Otherwise this whole thing indeed makes no sense.
> If the code is well-documented and everything is nicely set up, you just need the right person who has access to VC and an untapped market (e.g. China) to pick it up and spin off from there
I think the idea is that it's trivial to take what you've described and add "a small amount of work that an early-career engineer (even if talented) describes as easy".
Well, the author did post the entire email thread (redacting information that may be proprietary) on Imgur.
Personally, I think the Replit CEO could have explained what the specific issues were before threatening to sue. Since there was no explanation on the CEO's part, I think it's perfectly warranted for the author to make this public.
Interesting to see my post fluctuating between -4~4 points in the first few hours before settling down with the downvotes :)
Thanks guys for the comments. Definitely helps to view this matter from more angles, and it's clearer now. This is certainly a case study of who not to work for. (I didn't know so much about Replit and its CEO prior and totally missed the totalitarian vibe he is giving)
Curious to see how much the Replit community & ecosystem would be affected this event.
>The CEO is probably just having trouble dealing with stress and is acting out. It happens.
I agree it's not uncommon for first-time founders/CEOs to see phantom ghosts and lash out; however, we should be careful to not normalize that kind of behavior. Founders often hold mentorship or supervisory positions over their current and ex-employees, so it's harmful when they react with aggression and manipulation.
At small companies, that betrayal of trust cuts deeper than it does in more common manager-employee relationships, IMO.
I disagree, I don't see it that way. The very first email says "Don't worry, I have no intention [..]". That to me, indicates OP was aware they were in a grey area.
The CEO Amjad Masad has been doubling down on his story both here on HN and on Twitter. Also, this is a story told with receipts, and receipts carry a weight of their own. Namely, private emails made public. You can see for yourself whether you'll ever see the other side speak through the language of receipts.
It's also notable that Amjad used to work at CodeAcademy on up-and-going interactive coding experiences. Now he has his own company building up-and-going interactive coding experiences. What did Amjad learn while he was at CodeAcademy, being privy to internal business operations?
Unless there was an NDA or some such (and since this isn't mentioned anywhere in the emails or post, I assume there's not) you can hardly sue someone for re-using knowledge they acquired during their job. How are you even supposed to know what the supposed super-magic super-secret sauce is if you never agreed to an NDA?
If that was the case almost everyone with a GitHub project could be sued to infinity, because almost everyone learns tons of things every day while working.
It is extremely unlikely that there was no NDA. I've literally only ever had one job that didn't make me sign an NDA, and the company had a whopping <10 employees.
Specifically California Business and Professions Code Section 16600,
“every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.”
In addition such issues must by law be decided in California courts and if they forced the issue into court and lost they would be liable for the cost of his defense.
Even outside of California there are limits to what you can enforce. Judges aren't liable to find that an infinite duration noncompete reasonable.
Another example in Washington State its now impossible to obtain noncompetes for anyone paid less than a rate of 100k per annum as an employee or 250k per annum as a contractor and they are limited to 18 months duration.
If you improperly assert a noncompete you are liable for 5000 or actual damages whichever is greater.
They are probably not asserting a noncompete because it is functionally impossible for them to do so. They would have to assert that he was making use of trade secrets or that in some nebulous way his design belonged to them. eg trade dress
I don't live anywhere near California (Québec), but it's kinda the same idea here (from what I've heard). Basically employees have the right to make a living and the onus is on the employer to prove an injury occured directly due to an (ex)employee's actions.
Still didn't stop everyone I've ever worked for from making me sign them, enforceable or not. I guess it's different elsewhere.
He might have signed one but it would be legally invalid and if pressed in court it would cease to exist in 0.5 seconds it wouldn't be worth the time to present.
As always seem to need a lawyer to be absolutely sure about any complex matter of law but it looks to me like creating even an identical product which this is not would fall within the scope of "any lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind" for clarity I read that as you can't stop a person from doing any of the above from a b and c rather than you can't stop someone from doing all of a b c.
I don't think Repl.it has a leg to stand on they just have a pile of money and the presumption of being willing and able to hire a shark in a suit to ruin someone's life with a baseless suit filed for the sake of harassment.
It's not clear to me that implementing the same concept after having seen and written some of their code constitutes copyright infringement.
If you hire an intern to work on your code base you own merely own the work that person creates for the duration of their internship. Your piddling money doesn't buy you the general knowledge of how such a solution works any more than an auto shop acquires by dint of buying a few hours of labor owns the mechanics understanding of how a transmission works.
Have you ever reimplemented something from scratch, perhaps in a different language, and ended up doing something in the same way as the original code? ... I sure have.
I would think that a few chunks of very similar code, and a well-paid expert testifying, plus the fact that he had knowledge of Replit's code from his employment, would go a long way towards a tough time in court for both parties. (Or, at the very least, that they both need to talk to lawyers before/when they start throwing around legal threats...)
It's kinda funny how their CEO writes on Twitter all the time that they are the best company in the world, with the best product, do most innovations in tech etc and 10 minutes later he is threatened by a small open-source project that wasn't even created to compete.
He blocked me on Twitter for pointing out something (technical) he said was wrong, and then he deleted his tweet. Told me everything I need to know about that guy.
Mentioned in my other comment, but just all the more evidence of a megalomaniac, insecure CEO trying to build a company out of shallow moats and little value creation
I don't really remember the context. This was 2+ years ago. He was trying to compare some search results on twitter vs google, when using exact match with one query but not the other.
Yeah - I don't really like piling on, but Replit and Roam both give off massive alarms for me regarding the founders.
Both seem to think they're Xerox PARC - or the most ambitious software companies on earth, both products seem pretty underwhelming.
Just seems wildly disproportionate to what they're doing. At least Steve Jobs was actually building stuff that was revolutionary. Elon Musk is building reusable rockets and pulling EVs from the future to modern day. Roam is making another centralized document editor?
In terms of software ambition neither of them come close to Urbit in what they're trying to accomplish, and Galen is not an ass about it.
I don't know if I'd go that far - I think dev environment set up is a massive pain, especially for newbies and it scares a lot of people away from development because of constant issues.
Solving this would be helpful for teaching and I think it's not trivial to do well. I think there's an argument that being good at troubleshooting and debugging is 90% of programming so the shitty dev environment setup currently is a bit of a filter, but I generally think that's a bad status quo rationalization.
All this is to say - I think there's a market and the product is likely valuable, but I also don't think it's reusable rockets or rebuilding the internet or the 'most ambitious software company in history'. This kind of framing turns me off and when paired with stuff like this post leads me to avoid the company entirely.
Recently repl.it announced they will integrate nix pkgs into their environment.
They are simply building a better ux on top of existing open source technology.
> "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."
If u are looking at this from a profitable angle then getting ux right is about gaining more users and making them pay.
Technical innovation is about creating something which wasn't possible before and not making a start-up wrapper over existing stuff.
In today's misaligned businesss models of marketing and advertising, there is less core technical research and more fluff
That depends on where you draw the line of "innovation". Is it an innovation when it's created, or when it changes the status quo?
I would consider an approachable wrapper over a difficult tool to be innovative. Programming languages are essentially just UX wrappers over assembly. Is garbage collection an innovation, or a UX improvement? What about type systems? None of them make things possible that weren't possible before, they just make it easier.
Information for the sake of information is interesting, but where is it's value if it can't be applied to anything?
Right, I get the same impression from Replit. I don't know why I got subscribed to some weird accelerator newsletter they started and the wording is akin to the nigerian prince scam (and as a side note a REPL website creating an accelerator for sure gives me some dotcom bubble vibes).
I'm sure there are a lot of incredibly clever startup founders out there but I get the impression that more than not you attract founders that are more interested in the status rather than the innovation aspect. I said status not money as a lot of the time these folks don't really care about money as long as they can add a "Founder of X, an YC funded company" on their profile and share their next viral tweet, with lots of adjectives, lots of buzzwords and no depth. Startup funding became a game of convincing others that you as a person deserve the funding, not the company itself.
I don't know the truth around that either way, but I think Roam is based in Utah at some ranch (even if they're funded by a16z). I wouldn't generalize his behavior to the rest of silicon valley culture.
I think his brother was also the QAnon shaman horn guy (at least he said as much on Twitter - maybe it was a joke?).
I don't think this was his brother - I think it was a joke (imo bad taste at the time). I did some research around it and it seemed that his brother does look alike but that other person had a different legal name.
Yeah and I liked it - good tongue-in-cheek satire that exaggerated a lot of things that have some basis in truth. It was ultimately a fictional show though and life in silicon valley is a lot more boring than that the vast majority of the time.
Isn't equating "victim of drug addiction" and "harms women" out of line? One is something that isn't really his fault and isn't because of his moral failings, and the other is dehumanizing nearly half of the population.
We had a startup called Runnable in 2013 that did a similar thing as repl.it. Coding sandboxes in many languages by spinning up docker containers on the backend [1]. We solved a lot of scaling problems, but I honestly thought the innovation was mostly handled by docker. And that was by 2013.
Pfizer doesn't really belong in that list. They applied money to an already made invention and scaled up an existing manufacturing process along with a dozen other companies. Pfizer is not even the only manufacturer of the BioNTech vaccine, nor is it the first manufacturer to express interest, nor did it take any risk.
I'd say the most innovative company in the world is probably Alphabet or Samsung.
I can totally understand why Alphabet is on the list, but what is your reason for regarding Samsung as the most innovative company? Nowadays I've found them struggling to compete with their Chinese and Taiwanese opponents.
Purely in the phone division, they are not that innovative. But they have their fingers in a lot of pies, and are still #2 in semiconductors, they innovate a lot in display technology, they have their own processors, Samsung Pay was pretty huge and still has a serious impact, they are one of the big lithium ion battery companies, the S-Pen also was really huge for mobile devices in general, their foldable screens have a lot of potential.
Another really big thing is that Samsung funds a lot of basic research also at the university level, which AFAIK none of the big tech companies do.
Well the product is obvious and easy to replicate without specialised knowledge. CEO likely realises this as much as everyone else so feels the need to overcompensate with personal marketing (and apparently now lawyers).
Gosh, I wish I received 20 million in funding for that idea that needed three days to be technically replicated by an intern.
My wish: Replit should sue intern, intern should get free attorney from EFF, case should be dismissed as "WTF" in court. Future CEOs will know that "an intern would need three days to technically replicate" is not a differentiator. Also, hope is not a strategy. VCs would learn that hearing BS from CEO is not "due diligence".
Intern would eventually be showered in money for speaking to further CEOs about that one mistake they should never do.
The world would move on and be a better place for everyone, except unprepared CEOs.
How long would it take an intern to replicate Twitter? Is Twitter worth millions? I think so.
I think it's really easy for tech teams to do things in a sub-optimal way and then get all caught up in fixing problems of their own making and start to think they're doing really great technical work and that it is a competitive advantage for the company. More companies need to face the fact that their software can be easily replicated and that the value lies elsewhere, such as brand, reputation, reliability, good customer service, etc -- other things that an intern can't replicate in a weekend.
Creating a facebook clone has been done by many and some like vk have achieved regional success but they are in that unique position because of brand. Facebook started to be used as a word I'll facebook you meant I will write you. That is similiar to I'll google that means to search for something.
Facebook playbook for market rise is legendary. The limited rollout, the college based communities based on your edu email created this campus privacy and campus group. Starting off with the ivy league schools and slowly working into other schools created this demand as people talked. By the time facebook opened to the general public they had such a buzz. When they rolled out to this group they included one killer feature.. they allowed you to give your hotmail email/password and they would get a list of your contacts from your email and invite them to facebook. That brought in your aunt, brother, old friends to facebook. That created a network effect. Throw in the whatapps story and instagram story and an election/congressional hearings and you have facebook today.
The code part seems so minor. Retracing their steps is impossible. The path to facebook killer is a huge challenge to think that could only be done in a weekend is crazy.
Facebook is such a shitshow these days, I'm starting to wonder if the door is open for a straight competitor that is simply less aggrrssive on the advertising.
The CEO is actually worried that this weekend project will make it hard for replit to raise fundings from investors because it makes it look like there is no moat to hosting hundreds of programming languages. The investors don't know that the code here doesn't scale.
Also, there is no moat. As far as I know, there are no major protected intellectual properties, technical or business learning curves, regulatory hurdles, intensive capitalization requirements, economies of scale... I suppose there may be some amount of network effect, but not so much that it's hard to imagine a competitor struggling to overcome it.
You are right. Other than the brand name recognition and the existing business relationships, I can't think of anything that would be tough for a funded competitor to replicate.
Doesn't seem to stop a lot of products when they target B2B or enterprise for whom the value proposition is actually the marketing, support, layers of regulatory compliance etc that they add. LastPass is an example. Whether Replit is doing that I don't know, but its a real model. Not, however one that is vulnerable to weekend projects.
Agreed... but the intern is obviously incredibly naive in thinking that repl.it would be happy to see one of their ex-interns working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they're doing... whether or not this is a threat to them right now. There's a tiny, but non-zero chance, that this project could become successful and who knows, take marketshare from repl.it... and while everyone is pretending they would never be afraid of an intern stealing their business, I doubt many of them saying that have been through this experience and know how it feels like running a business and trying to stay on top of all the scams and bullshit that will get in your way, including from previous "allies" like ex-employees who think can do better.
Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of people to work on some product, you teach them "secrets of the trade", send them to conferences, let them participate in making decisions, giving them extraordinary insight in the area of work you are active on... and as soon as they leave your company, they use all that knowledge to try to create something with that on their own (I can understand it, once you konw stuff and enjoy it, you want to keep working on it even in your own time), just for fun... basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.
This is incredibly unprofessional. If he had at least come up with something original based on that knowledge , I would be totally on his side, but his stuff, while it may not be an exact copy of repl.it, is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do that.
Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years to get an idea out to the world and make it work for others as good as they can... if you want to use your knowledge, just contribute back to the project if it's open-source (your contribution will be a lot more useful, very likely, to other people than your poor, basic little project)! If you actually want to compete, which the author claims was not at all his goal (yeah, right, until someone shows even a trace of interest in paying something for it), then by all means go ahead and act reckless, but you'll need to come up with some pretty major advantage to have any chance, and will be taking pretty huge risks with lawsuits, but that's business as usual in the corporate world.
> Agreed... but the intern is obviously incredibly naive in thinking that repl.it would be happy to see one of their ex-interns working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they're doing.. whether or not this is a threat to them right now. There's a tiny, but non-zero chance, that this project could become successful and who knows, take marketshare from repl.it...
Too bad, that's business and how a functioning free market works. If it's that important to Replit, then they should patent it. If they can't get a patent then, again, too bad.
There are other legitimate ways of protecting trade secrets, such as requiring people to sign an NDA and/or non-compete before they see your secret sauce.
I'm not defending how the CEO behaved here - it looks very unprofessional at best - but the patent system is not the only or the best mechanism to enforce intellectual property rights.
I bring up patents because of the last line in the OP that insinuates that it wouldn't be out of character for Repl.it to react similarly to competing businesses:
> If someone with an actual commercial enterprise were to offend Replit, I shudder to think what treatment they might receive.
Patents would cover both the employee and outside competitor situations.
NDAs are legally enforceable in all of the US.
Non-competes are non-enforceable in California. NDAs however cannot be so generic that they act like NDAs and must be time limited and a few other caveats that aren't a big deal.
>Just look at this from the other side: you employ lots of people to work on some product, you teach them "secrets of the trade", send them to conferences, let them participate in making decisions, giving them extraordinary insight in the area of work you are active on... and as soon as they leave your company, they use all that knowledge to try to create something with that on their own (I can understand it, once you konw stuff and enjoy it, you want to keep working on it even in your own time), just for fun... basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.
Two things, first: You write like the company did the teaching, sending to conferences, allowing to participate ... out of the goodness of their heart. Obviously they did this because they saw a value in this, in fact they even pay their employees money to do these things.
Moreover, what do you think happens when people leave companies, they never use the knowledge they acquired? Do the companies continue to own that knowledge? Moreover, it even happens all the time employee leave and even found direct competitors to their previous employees. Just look at the founding history of Intel for a famous example. Also by the same measures we could accuse the repl.it CEO of stealing ideas from codeacademy and facebook where he worked previously, I mean he build an interactive website.
I'm sorry but this is a lot of words to say "be subservient to your old boss". There's nothing wrong in what this dude did. He made an open source experiment and for that he was threatened practically at gun point. The contents of the emails he received are highly unprofessional and childishly antagonistic
It's pretty much understood that your institutional knowledge will go for a walk in this industry. Taking it personally is more unprofessional than what the intern did.
> it is clearly doing the exact same thing... how is that not at least "stealing the idea"?? Just don't do that.
Ideas aren't worth the paper they're written on, and a startup founder should know that better than anyone else. Hell, wasn't Fairchild "the same idea" as Shockley Semi?
I have a lot of respect for what repl.it is and their vision, and the intern did not come close to copying it. But I did lose a bit of respect for the current leadership if this is how they respond to toy reimplementations of certain features.
OP had anticipated your complaints in his post, and pre-replied to them. For example:
Replit makes a webapp you can use to run code online in different programming languages. This is nothing new (just Google “run python online” for proof), so Replit’s value proposition is extra features like sharing your work, installing third-party packages, and hosting webapps.
...
Now, none of the ideas I used in my open-source project were “internal design decisions”: they’ve all been published publicly on Replit’s blog (I knew this because I’d been asked to write some of those blog posts during my internship). And my project also wasn’t any more of a Replit clone than any of the other websites on the first few pages of Google results for “run python online”, most of which look exactly the same.
You may disagree with these claims, but the general / hypothetical stance of your post does not give me any reason to think OP is blowing smoke up our collective asses.
For that matter, the CEO of Replit could be more specific about what OP's 'crime' is, though I suspect the worst of it is that OP's actions revealed how threadbare the Emperor's clothes are.
Well, but most people are saying the company shouldn't be afraid of an intern... and you are rightly pointing out that ex-employees take what they've learned and start a competitor all the time, sometimes very successfully (I do think some of your examples are imoral if you ask me, but in business, I know that what's not illegal gets a pass however repugnant)... that's why so many companies have contracts that will forbid you from doing so (illegal in some jurisdictions, but I believe it's legal in most).
If all the person leaving is doing is creating the same thing, it's unlikely to be worthwhile. You'd be competing against an entrenched competitor with a customer base and brand recognition. What makes it worthwhile is if you want to do something different that they're unwilling to do.
For Zoom, that was to market the product to random people for free or close to free because the cost to provide it had fallen enough to make it worth while.. WebEx was unwilling or unable to do so. I'm sure it was suggested many times. Probably even by the soon to be CEO of Zoom before he left to do it himself.
Sometimes the original company is worried about cannibalizing their sales, or shifting focus from their current customers, or it's just plain a case of them moving far too slowly to take advantage of the market. These are all cases where someone leaving and starting a new company to serve this demand is a good thing for consumers, regardless of whether it's good for the original company. Companies that can't respond to market needs are inefficient, and in a well functioning market suffer for that.
In a poorly functioning market, such as one with overly onerous regulatory hurdles, or litigation preventing competition, or customer lock-in, customers are given fewer choices and competition is constrained. People taking their expertise and making new companies to serve different segments of that market is a feature, not a bug or problem. It's how the market works. If repl.it is worried about a hobby project that can't scale and doesn't seem to be attempting to compete in the market, how much value is it actually providing? Threatening litigation says a lot more about their product than the competitor, IMO, and what it says is not flattering.
Because Replit didn't originate the idea of "web site you can execute code on". There's no idea to be stolen here, or if there was stealing, it's not from Replit.
> working on a project that does pretty much the same kind of thing they're doing
Radon outlined why this isn't true. [1]
> basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there.
It appears as if you're advocating that Radon should've treated the open-source code as if it was closed? [1]
> This is incredibly unprofessional
In what world is it unprofessional to work on a personal side project that has ZERO commercial interests and is using 100% public open-source code? This is actually one of the most professional online disagreements I've ever seen..
> Show some respect to your ex-boss and collegues who are working hard for several years
> basically spreading some of that knowledge you gave them and making it packaged and accessible not only to future contributors of their project, but to all competitors and genuine copycats out there
With this reasoning anyone at Amazon cannot join another ecommerce, or anyone at Microsoft OS cannot join Apple, or anyone in iPhone team cannot join Android.
If you are worried that your product is at the mercy of people not talking about it, or experimenting with the knowledge in future, then thats the least of your worries. The product, the team and the company is in a deep mess.
> If he had at least come up with something original based on that knowledge
Repl.it itself is completely unoriginal... there's been websites doing this stuff for decades now. Of course, the CEO has to live in denial of this, and is easily threatened/offended when confronted by this reality.
> there's been websites doing this stuff for decades now.
Would this hold up in case of a lawsuit? I mean, can Replit's CEO accuse the guy of copying some of their work if there's evidence of prior art that predates both projects?
In theory no that's exactly the sort of thing you'd need to make it go away, the mechanism exactly depending on the case.
e.g. if they had a patent on something and were accusing infringement you'd countersue to say the patent's invalid (which I think in a nicely engineering appealing way is conceptually separate from the question of whether or not an awarded patent has been infringed upon).
Trademarks, being a de facto recognisably you mark, are not if they are in widespread use - which is why you get a lot of big guys suing tiny little guys and tabloids pick it up outraged they'd pick a fight so below their weight - but at some point enough little guys diluting your brand is going to mean it's no longer your brand, your trademark, and then it's too late to fight it.
(IANAL.) I assume this isn't about a non-compete clause otherwise he would've just said that instead of this vaguer message. (And it was two years ago OP worked there anyway.) So unless there's a patent supposedly infringed on, or closed source code copied out, I don't know what the complaint could even be in the first place? Just reads like an empty threat to me. That 'repl.it superiority' commit message is unfortunate though.
If what the ex-intern did can be summarized as slapping an eval() around a form submission and that would somehow threaten your business model then your product is intellectually void and garbage.
I think this is a bad a take. How many different positive ways was there to approach this situation? The response from the CEO was incredibly unprofessional and seemed unnecessarily antagonistic to the point of provocation.
No. I didn't even say I was any less naive :D I am talking from experience, almost got into trouble because of similar behaviour, but after thinking hard about the situation, I decided that I was actually in the wrong for thinking I can just take what I learned and give it for free to the world and my old company's competitors to do as they wish. I can see how I, as the CEO, would've not thought nicely of such behaviour.
If they were that valuable why would you ever let them leave?
You can't end the employment agreement and still expect others to act like they work for you. Every ex-employee is a business person on the same level as you. If they see an opportunity and beat you, you were a fool for letting them go.
The whole startup space is disgusting. There are a bunch of lucky founders 'chosen ones' who get a ton of VC funding; as soon as they accept VC funding, users 'magically' start pouring in (cabal/manipulation?), which attracts more funding... Then some megacorp acquires the startup for millions of dollars. Easy peasy.
Then these lucky, spoiled-rotten assholes think they're entitled to sue anyone who tries to compete with them. Everyone knows this is not a free market. Just a bunch of artificially selected spoiled brats with rich daddies/friends enriching themselves by destroying society.
Of course, but they're liable to damage their reputation as a VC firm if they continue funding garbage without vetting it at all, just cause someone's techbro buddy asked nicely for YC's backing.
I wouldn't underestimate the potential of that project.
I know of other cases where well funded CEOs have tried bullying away someone who recently worked for them from starting a company in a related space. Glad that they weren't able to shut it down, and the new founder has raised a nice round. I'd love to see Radon succeed with his project.
IANAL but I don't think you can patent "path depencence". It is sunk cost
Exactly my thoughts. CEO knows anyone could replicate the project.
I even go so far to say that the CEO doesn't want his secret to out that he is not that great programmer after all. He just took someone else's idea and build a company around it.
My reaction as well. I’ve used Replit lots. It’s great! No offence to Radon, but I would not consider his project a threat to Replit. The best case scenario is it’s a price-sensitive OSS alternative which would naturally have a much much smaller market. Interesting that the CEO was so threatened by this.
"You don't need to remind you the essence of competition is
always been quite simple, any kid working in a garage
anywhere in the world with a good idea can put us out
of business".
Harassing independent developers working is an important component of the Antitrust plot. And that's what the replit guy is doing.
Milo: It would be open source, we offer it free to
everybody, just charge for tech support.
Gary: Wow, free.
It's a cut-throat business we're in Milo.
It's just a matter of time before someone borrows your
technology, improves it and makes a billion dollars on it.
What would you do with a billion dollars Milo?
...
The question really is,
How many of the people you share discoveries with
will be altruistic? and how many will make fortunes
of your generosity?
The movie shows the conflict between open source and proprietary software. Between altruism and financial opportunity.
VC funded companies aren't some tech billionaire funding a cool new project.
VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn't be surprising when people try very hard to protect that investment to help them get a better return.
> VC funded companies are investments that they want a return on. It shouldn't be surprising when people try very hard to protect that investment to help them get a better return.
Yeah, but if the investment is threatened by a weekend project built in a few days, it means that a serious competitor could destroy it in a couple weeks.
The thought that came to mind about this was a baker stepping on ants outside his store because nobody was coming into the store. If nobody wants to come into the store because of ants crawling in front, your store has larger issues.
I've worked for ten years on the Lively Kernel project [1,2,3], originally created by Dan Ingalls at Sun Microsystems. Running JavaScript, Smalltalk, R, Clojure, Haskell, Python, C++ and a few other languages in it. When I first saw replit, I thought, wow someone copied 1/4 of Lively. Do they really think they had an original idea?
Did any of the Replit people work on Lively Kernel? I think what has the Replit guy upset is not that some random person did something similar, but rather that someone who worked at Replit did something similar.
As far as Lively Kernel goes, is there a list of languages it supports? All I got from your links is that it is a JavaScript-based web development environment, seems to have a lot of Smalltalk related stuff, and that it includes something called lively.ide, which provides "Tool support for programming and debugging JavaScript, HTML, CSS, shell" and "Other languages can be plucked in as needed (see cloxp and LivelyR)."
> Did any of the Replit people work on Lively Kernel?
No, and I wasn't suggesting that. Though Lively was a project at YC Research in 2016/2017 and replit is a YC 18 company I think. So they might have heard about it but I do not remember giving any demos to folks involved with it.
And even if, we actually invited folks to copy the ideas. The Lively project was not a product but trying to carry forward a set of ideas rooted in Smalltalk. Every copy (even if its not a good one) is cool to see. It has the change to make the language and tooling eco system better, programming easier and more immediate, and might invite more people to get started building software and having fun with computers.
> is there a list of languages it supports
No not really. We build out a few to have more polish (as you mentioned LivelyR and cloxp, support for shell programming and node.js that is part of Lively itself). But there isn't really much to it: here is e.g. a quick'n dirty Haskell "subserver" that can run as part of Lively and allows to load a Haskell runtime, load Haskell files and evaluate expressions [1] (this is anno 2013, please don't judge too hard about the code ;). Some of these are floating around. We then customized the ACE editor [2] a bit for providing some fundamental editing experience (it has syntax highlighting for a large number of languages builtin). That's it, for a simple integration, not much is needed really.
There is also the amazing Ohm project [3], a toolkit for writing PEG parser and interpreters which is standalone but got its integration into Lively as well. It allows to quickly experiment with new language ideas or implement grammars/interpreters for existing languages.
Hey Robert, it would be great to get in touch. I'm part of a group that has built an authorship system inspired by HyperCard/Smalltalk [1] and we are using OhmJS to implement our language and interpreter.
We are inching closer towards a more "public" release, and hope to be there in the next few weeks
There still exists a fork of the Riju project on github which I have cloned locally.
I would be more interested in running all of these languages in wasm and the execution state can be live migrated between the server and the client, that would be something that could surpass other online repls.
Yeah wasm is definitely getting interesting as a platform for these. As long as you can build/compile a language VM (such as the Python VM) or a language compiler itself in wasm there shouldn't be much stopping you.
Thinks like that have been done even with plain JS and the results are very cool, see e.g. SqueakJS, a Squeak/Smalltalk VM implemented directly in JS.
Lively Kernel all runs in the client, though, while repl.it runs the code server-side. Not that this was new, either, but it seems confusing to compare to Lively. (It's been years since I've checked out either of these projects so sorry if I'm misremembering or missing new developments.)
Not quite, Lively runs code both client side (JS, languages implemented on top of JS) as well as server side. The Lively server has a "subserver" system [1] that allows you to connect to VMs, compilers, etc.
I'm on a job search, and Replit is one of the places I was going to apply, off of their listings on HN Who is Hiring?. So much for that, and I suspect a lot of devs are going to feel the same. (I don't think I'm good enough to get in, but there're a lot of really good devs who read HN who are.) In a seller's market for developers, this could hurt them in the form of less good talent applying.
That said, my gut feeling as an outsider is that they feel genuinely burnt by a former employee making something similar to their product. Not just cynically trying to smash the competition. Not that that justifies anything—everyone thinks they're the good guy (well, almost everyone).
It's very easy to justify doing something to benefit yourself while writing it off as justified, and getting massively offended when someone does the same thing to your perceived detriment.
> That said, my gut feeling as an outsider is that they feel genuinely burnt by a former employee making something similar to their product. Not just cynically trying to smash the competition. Not that that justifies anything—everyone thinks they're the good guy (well, almost everyone).
Agreed, I think it's totally fair for the CEO to be a little peeved by the project, and the complaint is about how horrible his handling of it was. This is exacerbated by how unfailingly polite and professional the ex-intern is in the (presumably) unabridged email thread.
Not only am I not interested in working for repl.it but I have asked my org to never pay for their products due to this behavior, we should not reward it and money has the loudest voice.
Yes, it would be against the rules at the top of the Who Is Hiring threads.
We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is involved [1]. That's why the OP has been at #1 all day - normally we downweight indignation posts at least a little, to compensate for the default tendency to massively upvote them, but we haven't touched this thread in any way. I don't think we'd take that so far as to selectively turn off the Who Is Hiring rules, though. It would set a confusing precedent.
Thanks for the reply - I definitely won't then. I didn't realize replit was a YC company, and understand the value in keeping Who's Hiring threads clean from criticism - could lead to interesting discussion but at the expense of distracting from the purpose of the thread.
im very glad that negative coverage of a YC startup is so highly upvoted on HN. we still only have your word for it, but thank you for doing what you can to err on the side of caution when it comes to YC startups.
It would likely go against the spirit of the community to hound a job posting like that. I don't disagree with the sentiment, but turning the hiring posts into any sort of flamewar/off-topic discussion dilutes the value of those threads.
That kind of behavior is what has ruined most social media. The job post threads are great because they are strictly about job posts. They would be much worse if they also included random color commentary. Everyone using this site knows how to research a company. There is literally no upside and a huge downside to what you're advocating.
I can see how allowing this could discourage companies from posting in these threads. I think it would be interesting to see how a hiring thread including criticism would play out, but appreciate that it would also likely invite a lot of flame wars, astroturfing and unproductive bickering.
A (different) jobs board where the companies posting the jobs do not have control of the comment discussion would be interesting to see - but would need a monetization strategy that ensures it can survive without turning into pay-to-censor junky platforms like Yelp or Glassdoor.
I do think it should be allowed to post the link of a related thread. If I see the hiring post on HN, I would like to know more about that company. It's true that I would search the company to find out more about them, but it would be easier to just scroll a bit and find a few threads about them.
If I’m reading those emails correctly, Amjad the CEO directly emailed you occasionally. It is pretty stunning that as the CEO of the company, he would stoop to what I interpret as pretty unprofessional communication and petty threats.
I also am failing to connect the dots about why Replit would even feel threatened - if you were as helpful of an intern as described, you’d think they would recognize that you had good intentions only when creating Riju - very odd behavior from Replit all around.
I mean, this was a marketing opportunity. They could've asked nicely if he'd be willing to link to repl.it for anyone who wants something more solid and scalable. It sounds from the early e-mails as if OP started out very positively predisposed towards them.
Instead they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty.
This is a great point- there were a ton of ways that this could have been handled that would have left all parties happy and better off, but the CEO went directly for the lawyer power play.
> they've now broadcast to their potential customer base that they're litigious and petty.
This will indeed the case, and I’ll personally won’t be recommending them anymore. If they’re so petty to threaten to sue some intern, they’re not worth doing business with.
Oracle lives by selling to management. Replit isn’t at a stage where it can do that - it will love and die by developer goodwill until it becomes big enough for management to want to buy it.
Are they, though? I’ve never come across Oracle Linux used for any other purpose than running Oracle software on it. MySQL and Java were very popular before Oracle bought them, and people’s distaste for Oracle has pushed many users towards alternatives like PostgreSQL or MariaDB. Google famously wrote their own Java implementation to avoid having to deal with Oracle.
With that said, I also think certain employees though have a very slippery mentality of this sort of vibe where they do things that might be sketchy or on the borderline not OK (but JUST on the line), and then rationalize as "but ... reason!". The tone of this whole article is very subtly reminiscent of that... the type of person that when given an inch will take 10 inches (not even a mile, not that severe), and always do it under the guise of many bullet points and being nice, like this article... but the undertones are there that they're really trying to push the boundary.
The tone here is "uhhh, I did this thing and it turns out it might be bad but I dont think so". Tbh, the tone he kept here is quite well mannered comparing to the situation at hand.
The vibe is more about a person being excited for doing something cool with tech and a company where they interned (not worked, interned!) feeling threatened because it crosses into their domain. If "let’s see what else can I maake with this" is an offense, then to hell I'll throw my lightbulbs away.
What do you make of the comment about "hardest intern we've ever worked with."
I understand the CEO is feeling very emotional and is clearly manipulating/exaggerating, but I would imagine he wouldn't say this if it were entirely 100% fabricated.
Do you believe any part of that statement might be true?
Why would they offer him a job right before saying that? Some of it could be true, absolutely, but it seems more emotionally manipulative than anything else, to me. The CEO was mad so he said something.
> Why would they offer him a job right before saying that?
A few people have mentioned that on this thread, but I don't think it's in sync with the reality of how incredibly hard it is to hire technical talent right now, esp talent that knows your systems well.
It's entirely possible for someone to be the most demanding intern a co has ever had and still be a great hire; hell, it might even be _correlated_. Interns usually haven't figured out workplace norms yet, and combining that with being smart and driven could easily yield good-faith behavior that nevertheless is "demanding" (for example, asking lots of questions about tasks he's given, asking for guidance with parts of the system he's not working on, etc etc). In that case, I would absolutely want to hire that intern, with the understanding that he'd need to get better at the cultural aspects of the job once he joined full-time (as all intern conversions do).
That being said, no question that it was a bizarre and immature thing for the CEO to bring up, and I don't disagree with your characterization of it as "emotionally manipulative".
I'm looking at this from the perspective of "is the emotion/frustration felt by the CEO valid". In other words, did this open source author actually do ANYTHING which could cause frustration in a previous employer. An important part of that is whether they were actually a 50% pain in the ass employee who repeatedly was pushy (but still perhaps is hireable because they were net positive)
I'm disregarding any commentary on actual action taken by the CEO, because as I said I think it's incredibly stupid and immature.
This reply below by @treis is a good explanation of how i feel about the answer to your question.
> Lots of CEOs/Owners will definitely be salty about that. And they're not totally wrong to feel that way. You pay someone a bunch of money only to watch them walk and help your competitor take your market share. It's understandable why that's upsetting. But they should have the maturity to understand that's how the world works and not throw a tantrum.
"...but I would imagine he wouldn't say this if it were entirely 100% fabricated."
How many of the CEO class have you interacted with? This is approximately Step 3 in the psychology: "OMG, I have to convince myself and the rest of the world that this person is not only wrong but also bad." He likely spent several minutes rehearsing the comment before writing. (No, really, I've sat there and watched someone repeat similar comments before a meeting, to make sure they believed it enough to be convincing.)
What boundary do you think they pushed though? I understand the sentiment in general, but I didn't get it here at all because I can't see anything wrong, bad or questionable that OP did.
Honestly there is nothing technically or legally wrong but I would say this was bad faith by the intern in a minor way. Like, its just not nice nor smart to do things that act against the interests of those that have put faith and trust in you. In this case, he's created a web site that at a surface level makes Replit look trivial to implement - boasts that in a weekend or two he's supported massively more languages. And absolutely, part of his knowledge as to how to do it came from what he probably learned there. So intentionally or not, he's done something that hurts the interests of his former employer.
So if you hired an electrician to fix a light bulb and then after they left they told everyone your house sucked. Illegal? no. Unprofessional? yes, slightly. Would you hire them again? no. Would you sue them? that would be ridiculous.
On balance, the CEO is clearly the one more in the wrong here and definitely acting in a dumb way. I would run away from investing in this company with him at the helm. But I would say there is a little bit of bad faith on the other side here too.
The area that seemed gray here particularly was the "internal decisions part." As someone who has designed maybe... 40+ interfaces, I know the tremendous amount of effort and thought that goes into the simple placement of a button being on the left or the right, with huge impacts to usability and user experience.
So when he posts a few images of other sites that "look" similar, I don't quite buy the fact that he didn't liberally borrow from the many hours of decisions by Repli. Thats purely a guess though, and I could absolutely be wrong.
I would imagine it would be easy for the author to rationalize it in his head that "well, lots of other sites have a button in the top row I can do it too!" and in effect, ends up copying a lot of Replit features without innovating on them simply because other sites "look similar"
I picture myself as a CEO seeing a previous employee with something that is very clearly using a lot of the decisions we worked out together, and then see a list of 20 bullet points trying to rationalize why it's ok, that would be super irritating to me, but that would be the limit of it. Definitely not worthy of anything more than a polite conversation, that's for sure.
Assume I am an employee. Assume I take a year or two of these internal decisions during my tenure at an org to my next employer. Would you be equally upset that my work experience was used elsewhere? Where is the line between your trade secret and my hard earned work experience?
Because that’s what work experience is: showing future employers where not to make mistakes that were previously learned in the course of work. That knowledge (that has a half life) is part of my compensation, arguably the most valuable of my total comp.
Lots of CEOs/Owners will definitely be salty about that. And they're not totally wrong to feel that way. You pay someone a bunch of money only to watch them walk and help your competitor take your market share. It's understandable why that's upsetting. But they should have the maturity to understand that's how the world works and not throw a tantrum.
A truly analogous situation would be the CEO of Repl.it working on Codeacademy Labs as an employee, a similar product to Repl.it, before leaving and launching Repl.it itself, which is what happened.
Yeah and well you don’t act petty and unprofessional as the CEO of any company. Tech does not get a pass on it. I fully enjoy watching an intern evoke this level of response from a well funded CEO. I was employee #1 for a start up still in business so I know how they can be your ‘baby’ but give me a break on this one... the CEO literally is projecting what he himself did onto this intern.
Being upset about something and acting on it are 2 very different things.
I don't know many people who would not be upset about investing many hours into something only to have someone copy it in 24 hour period and repost it with only slight modifications as theirs.
Acting on that, however, is a very different story. If someone is going to act on such emotions they shouldn't be a CEO to begin with probably.
That wouldn't upset me because that is simply knowledge not implementation.
As I said in the other reply, my post is at an emotional/personal level (as an owner/creator and also employer), not necessarily a legal or more political one. On that basis i 100% side with the author here.
I was merely saying this situation definitely smells like one where there's more to the story than "big bad replit picking on poor innocent open source guy". Just the tone of his writing seems, and the "one of most difficult interns" gives me gut reaction that he might actually be someone who tries to be pushy while being nice.
> Just the tone of his writing seems, and the "one of most difficult interns" gives me gut reaction that he might actually be someone who tries to be pushy while being nice.
You took a single sentence out of an entire article with plenty of other supporting evidence to construct a reality where someone in a similar position as you would have cover.
You're acting as if my reaction is based on one sentence. It's most certainly not. I read the entire post, looked at all the screenshots, looked between the lines of the words, looked at the emotion behind why/what is being said.
My current "constructed reality" is that the author built something in a very short time, likely liberally re-using design decisions from his previous employer. And that the CEO, who is a douche, got emotionally upset over this, probably from his perspective/shared history which is something NO ONE ON HN CAN SEE, and there's likely more to the story. Emotionally I can understand why this might upset Replit CEO. One can be frustrated, while still being mature enough to not let it affect action, and certainly not threatening to sue or any of that.
HN is so black and white sometimes it's painful. Just because I can relate emotionally to one person being frustrated, doesn't suddenly mean I fully support all their actions or live in some fantasy land tiny projects should be sued for exaggerated claims
He interned during a summer at repl.it 2 years ago. So even if he took some results of internal discussion on how to place buttons on the website, this is not like they had a cure for cancer.
If you ever move between two big tech firms, they'll sit you down in a room with a lawyer who clarifies exactly where that line is.
IANAL, but roughly, general knowledge is ok, but specific results aren't. If you were party to user research findings at company A, it's likely against your NDA to tell company B "we should do X" based on the remembered outcome of that research.
Patents can apply, but it’s really only used in novel and unique situations. Even if Replit had a patient on its UI/UX design, if you were able to find evidence of prior art, you could petition to invalidate.
Not to disagree with you. Didn't Apple sue Microsoft for copying the Mac UI on copyright ground? I know they settled, not sure what's the real legal outcome of it.
Edit: Ok, just looked it up. Apple lost all claims on copyrighting the Mac UI.
The author's excuses about "not intended to compete" or "it's free and open-source" (paraphrasing) aren't relevant when it comes to whether he stole anything or is competing. That said, the CEO is out of line IMO.
I agree about the tone, but I think it comes from youthful inexperience and a lack of (legal) knowledge. OP has no idea where the line is, what the lines are, or what professional legal defense would actually require/entail. And so they're stuck trying to rationalize every possibly-defensible point in the court of public opinion.
Also, a good way to get employees that aren't testing boundaries is to hire experienced developers rather than interns who are still learning the world.
Overall I don't see what leg repl.it has to stand on here - their product relies on taking numerous free software packages and bundling them into proprietary software, and yet they have the gall to consider button placement some secret sauce?! But it also depends on what OP's employment contract says and when he actually developed this. Altogether, this really just looks like a case of a CEO personally bullying someone else because they can.
Amjad the CEO of Replit could be fairly insecure person afraid of losing his company's dominance/marketshare to some simple intern/developer. I am sure he did NOT expect this level of heat.
This article and the associated 'press' could serve as a text-book case for insecure start-up CXOs.
I mean, making a whole blog post about the situation, and then making the top post of hacker news, just kind of keeps the sniper scope of lawyers pointed at himself.
The intern? Yeah he’s fine. There’s no real consequence for that person other than proving he’s a capable employee who can be a bit obsessive. They should work in a tangentially related area of product for awhile and forget it ever happened. Technical hires who can implement your idea is much more valuable in bulk than ideas themselves.
Well, I wrote a small comment here on replit, and their CEO actually tracked me down by username on another forum, and sent me a PM there.
Nothing harmful, he was just curious about what I liked or didn't like about using replit - tbh I found it pretty cool that they're so close to the user base. Saw the message weeks afterwards, and forgot the reply him.
I’d agree with you if this was just a random person, but from this thread (I haven’t read the article) I gather that s/he was actually an intern... surely every intern/employee would sign some kind of non-compete / trade secret / intellectual property agreement? In that case, the CEO is completely justified in pursuing to enforce that agreement!
Again, it would be different if the CEO threatened a random third party that happened to do a weekend project in the same vertical...
Why are you reading and replying to the comments when you haven't read the article? You've come at this with a terrible take by inventing a non-existent NDA that would exonerate the CEO. Why bother?
The article didn't specifically mention "no NDA" either.
We've only seen one side of the story here
I don't know if I were the former intern in question writing a blog post about this I'd be damn sure to specify that there's no NDA or other agreement in place that would legally prevent him from doing this.
I could understand an over eager lawyer but this is the CEO of a company with $20 million in funding personally threatening to sic the lawyers on a one man open source project. This is evidence that: 1) he doesn’t have anything better to do, bad news for Replit, 2) he’s afraid of this little project, also bad news for Replit.
I’m also gonna add that, if I invested in a company and the CEO used any fraction of that funding to crush a non-competitor with legal might, I would seriously regret my investment. It seems to me this guy doesn’t understand his own value prop more than a former intern.
Yep. At $20m raised, the CEO should be building product, closing customers, building positive press for the company (oops), and recruiting. Time spent on anything else is highly suspect.
How 'empty' is Replit as a company if some rando intern is a threat ... and/or how poor is the CEO at deciding how to spend his time if this is how they choose to do it?
If the CEO didn’t throw a tantrum over the exact things his company claims to support (OSS, creativity, etc.), nobody would know about the intern’s weekend project. But he did, and now we’ll see something of a Streisand effect [0].
To be fair, it is kind of suspect to intern for a company and, at the end of that internship, turn around and create effectively the same thing. And OP’s dismissive tone and propensity to hand wave away things that may be relevant in his blogpost certainly don’t make them seem ideal to employ. But ‘suspect’ only in the sense that (in my personal opinion) it gives credence to the CEO’s comment on the intern being difficult. I still think replit is in the wrong here.
Well, let's hope repl.it wasn't started by someone working on the same kind of tech at another well-known brand. It would be ironic or "kind of suspect", no?
I had nearly the same feeling while reading this and specifically finally getting to the part where the author mentions they were an intern. Being an intern at the company is kinda important to this story, had they not been an intern at the company I think this would have been a vastly different conversation.
I honestly think both are in the wrong here, the CEO should have been a bit more relaxed about the handling of this. As well the intern really should have tried to stay away from projects which directly relate to past company business models.
I also question if this article could be considered defamatory.
I think for something to be legal defamation, it has to be demonstrably false. This article seems pretty safe, since it's mostly direct screenshots of the emails sent by the CEO.
Based on what I am reading, unless I am misunderstanding, which considering how our laws are written I'm surprised anyone is capable of understanding them entirely.
It seems California outlawed non-competes in the sense that if I am a programmer, and I sign a contract which states that I must not be a programmer for the next 5 years after working for X, that is instantly voided.
But this is different, as an intern I copied in essence the core business model (not directly copying the code) and open sourced it, seems like a conflict of interest. Which in this case a non-compete might be able to be held as it's mostly saying I'm a programmer for a company which does X, I can't move to a competitor, or become a competitor (which is somewhat what the intern did).
As someone who is definitely not a lawyer or judge I have no idea where the laws/courts or otherwise stand on this matter in actuality.
You are reading that wrong, the agreement you describe would not be enforceable in California
The only part of a non compete that is valid to my knowledge is that if an employee leaves for a competitor the company can have them sign an agreement not to poach employees, but even that is very limited. If Bob leaves company A for company B and signs such an agreement, his former coworker Alice is free to say "Hi Bob I'm really excited by company B can I have a referral?" Bob didn't make first contact so he's free to help bring Alice over.
In California, you would have the burden of proof that your business was damaged by the actions of the employee you allege is in breach of contract. The business would also be on the hook for the employees legal fees if they can't prevail.
Add to that, i don't see any copying of a "business model" here. Seeing as the ex-intern is not even charging for his software and is giving away the source code for free.
I think your understanding is incorrect. That site says specifically says without qualification:
> In other words, non-compete agreements are not enforceable in California.
Edit: I don't think it has ever been possible to bar employees from continuing their profession when they leave your employ. Non-competes have ALWAYS been about working for competitors.
While replit isn't doing very much in wrapping these languages in a frontend (and something that is clearly straightforward to replicate), they are doing all the work that comes with scaling that to many users on the web (I guess that includes moderation).
They should have just been happy with that.
It takes more than just being able to run all the languages in sandboxes to compete - if you tried this, people would be mining bitcoin and hosting all sorts of awful stuff.
The difference between what Amjad tweets publicly and what Amjad threatens the ex-intern privately is jarring.
That makes me think that either the tweets are empty virtue signaling; or Amjad is legit worried that an intern open-source project can accidentally outcompete his company!
My guess would be more the available source rather than the website itself. I think it's fair to say somebody who interned at a place would have had things explained to them and had access to internal design docs which the intern themselves wouldnt necessarily have figured out if working from scratch.
Replit is about everything surrounding the eval() call. The intern's clone, according to them, had nothing of this (scaling, user accounts, saving code snippets, ...). If they'd rebuilt all that too I'd see the point, but really, what great secrets are there in those "design docs" that just refer to the part of the service where you put in your code and click run? These things have been around for at least a decade, this one just seems to have the most languages.
If it is bizarre for an intern then how does it look when "employee #1 of Code Academy" starts Repl.it right after working on the same kind of thing there? This smells like someone who saw himself in the intern and disliked it.
Since Amjad has so much to say about ethics, quick pulse-check, lets rank these in terms of their ethical foundations: building a love-letter open-source hobbyist alternative to a large application; shutting down this alternative with potentially unfounded legal threats; making millions of dollars standing on the shoulders of giants by effectively repackaging and selling hosted open source software.
> we’re also excited to announce one of the first (of many!) projects that Amjad has worked on with us: Codecademy Labs, the easiest way to play with JavaScript, Ruby, and Python online
I'll just leave this here so we can all bask in the insane hypocrisy of this entire episode.
Edit: See Amjad's response below – seems Repl.it may have pre-dated this hiring in which case it makes the irony slightly less delicious. Did no learnings from scaling the concept at Codeacademy make it into the current product?
Someone could (and likely is) building a better Repl.it with Nix and Theia. It's fucking flabbergasting to me that everyone in this thread acts like Repl.it is some magical product.
And that's not even accounting for the half-dozen other production-quality VS-Code-in-browser projects.
Sorry, it's just not a unique space. Not surprising at an that an egostistic founder isn't handling it well.
Even neglecting Godbolt, Cppreference, and Coliru.
Godbolt is Compiler Explorer, mainly to look at assembly output, but provides editing, benchmarking, and profiling of many languages and compiler versions. I think Godbolt delegates running code to some other site, don't recall who.
Cppreference.com is mainly a C++ and C language and library standards reference library, but provides sample programs and means to run them on various compiler versions.
That uses Coliru, which also provides edit, build, and run.
Precisely, and in that context, let's remember that such projection is fundamental to our psychology. Thus, this story would better serve as litany of cautionary vignettes of humans being human than a story of David v Goliath, a tale of The Demanding Intern, or anything else bigger-than-life.
Honest question: why are you so aggressively shilling for Repl.it in this thread?
Been reading it all day to see how it develops, and I've seen at least like 15 low-quality snippy posts by you defending Amjad Masad and his position. A friendly reminder that these kind of posts really lower the quality of discourse here on HN.
Actually, I apologize. I now realize that Radon's actions were not morally wrong. My only contention was that he broke the non-compete agreement. But I believe that agreement is itself is illegal in California.
To be fair, you can see that the README of the jq-console project that was mentioned in this article had a reference to what seems to be the predecessor of repl.it months prior to the publication of this article: https://github.com/replit-archive/jq-console/blame/7c0b9ffa8...
However... the irony is still hilarious, and this in no way excuses Amjad's emails
It's a valuable idea that everyone should keep in mind throughout their lives, and throughout their careers.
Same thing with people who speak negatively of others to you in private. Odds are they do the same thing, but about you, when speaking with others. If you confide something negative about someone else to them, they'll probably tell that person.
This is a story told with receipts, and receipts carry a weight of their own. Namely, private emails made public. You can see for yourself whether you'll ever see the other side speak through the language of receipts.
So far all he has done is double down on the story told through the emails.
pretty weird/low class move to build a free clone of the product you just worked on.
pretty petty decision to threaten to sue your former intern for his weird move.
also, threatening someone with money is a pretty surefire way to look like an asshole.
similarly petty decision to spend hours documenting everything to post on HN and start throwing mud in public.
everyone seems well within their legal rights but ethically seems like there were a lot of off-ramps for someone to be the bigger person and none were taken.
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?
Why? If the contract didn't specify that he can't do it (or if it did but cannot be enforced in court) then he is free to do what he wants.
A company already has advantages: they have money, they have a time to market advantage and they have more manpower / combined experience. If that is not sufficient, then maybe the company simply needs to improve or needs to accept that it cannot succeed.
i mean you're right, he doesn't have to. but i'm pointing out that he's not being personally persecuted for no reason. doing literally anything else than open sourcing his employer's tech stack makes the whole concern about needing protection pretty unnecessary.
ianal but absent some nda seems like it's probably legal for him to do it.
it just seems like kind of a dick move. i could mentor new engineers, wait until someone told me about a really cool idea, then steal it from them and build it myself. there's no law against it, it's just is kind of a dick move and seems kind of wrong.
as noted above, ceo is acting like a dick as well. but i think the way this dude is trying to play the victim through clickbaiting HN is a bit much. just my opinion.
> 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.
> similarly petty decision to spend hours documenting everything to post on HN and start throwing mud in public.
As someone else pointed out earlier in the thread, he kinda asked for it:
> It is unethical and would be obviously so to outside observers as well. Feel free to consult your mentors or people with more experience than you in the industry.
> pretty weird/low class move to build a free clone of the product you just worked on
It's extremely common to do that. Where do you think all this industrial open source software comes from? People work on a product, then they leave the company and want access to a similar tool. Happens all the time.
If you're an expert in X, you're gonna be building several Xs in your career. That's how the economy works. An employer suing you for building another X is ridiculous. If you're not funded for legal defense, your best way forward is going public. He did everything right.
Even if we agree there's symmetry in behavior (which is a big 'if'), one of the actors is an intern and the second one has millions in funding. The latter has thus much more potential to do harm.
yeah i mean same argument about why they shot harambe because some kid wanted to climb the fence into the gorilla exhibit.
i actually agree that corporations have too much power versus individuals in society. but it's a bit much to jump into the gorilla exhibit and then write a clickbait post about whether it was unethical.
That was a clone of Replit that we made work at Codecademy. I started working on Replit (or repl.it) back when I was a student in Jordan. I didn't have a laptop so every time I wanted to get some programming done I had to setup a development environment at the university or at work. The idea for Replit was when you needed a repl to do some coding you should easily get one from anywhere including a mobile device. I thought it would benefit many people, especially those who don't have the means to buy expensive computers.
It took 2 years of work to get something working and in 2011 we launched on HN (2011 web archive snapshot here https://web.archive.org/web/20111007050930/http://repl.it/ and HN launch here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3056490). It was the first of its kind and it inspired a lot of projects and still does today. It was totally open-source (https://github.com/replit-archive/repl.it) and after the launch it was used as infrastructure by Codecademy (which later employed me) and Udacity and many others to deliver interactive coding in the browser. I was thrilled about that.
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. But there is some line that 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) and I think to someone who knew Replit's architecture well, this project would clearly
be across it. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
What's interesting is that the redacted full thread alludes to some of these invisible aspects, and Radon appears to have a justification for doing things that way (though it's all blacked out so we cannot evaluate the merits of that argument).
I find it telling that Radon wrote out an extensive explanation of why he believes his project is not based on replit, and Amjad basically responds with "you're wrong, you copied it" without addressing anything Radon said.
To be fair, there’s only a few ways to say that the correct solution seems obvious in hindsight.
I agree with Amjad there. I just don’t think that working with something means you can never use those patterns again. That’s ridiculous. If I couldn’t use any of the patterns that I learned about in previous jobs I would still be programming as if I had 1 year of university experience.
What I mean is that it doesn't seem like this is a "the correct solution seems obvious in hindsight" situation based on Radon's technical explanation of his project.
"It is unethical and would be obviously so to outside observers as well. Feel free to consult with your mentors or people with more experience than you in the industry."
Wow. Amjad basically invited Radon to post about this online.
And it comes across as very condescending imo. We are in a world where a brilliant intern may know or sense as well as any CEO, from YC or not. That what makes this world interesting.
I am not sure I agree. The topic of intellectual property and trade secrets in software, or if IP laws should even apply, is probably another discussion entirely. However, there's no reason to trivialize it to cutthroat copy and pasted code. If Radon was a state actor, I am unsure HN would be responding the same way here.
Obviously, knowledge learned from mistakes or design discussions from one's time at another company is no issue. The intern seemed to have worked on a project very limited in scope to the overall product (package management). It is quite possible the bells and whistles that Replit's CEO is claiming that is copied are taken from design documents made by someone else - which is not at all learnings from working around a particular domain. In my opinion, this might actually be problematic. I don't think Radon was being malicious here, but you might also want to consider that Radon is a fresh graduate and might not have fully considered the implications of where it is acceptable for him to draw designs from.
I would have been willing to buy that if Amjad wasn’t clearly being a major ass here. He basically prejudiced me to take Radon’s side, regardless of the merits of the argument.
Yeah, I think Amjad would be fully justified in saying “Hey, I’m not comfortable with this. I don’t think keeping that website up is worth throwing away a strong reference from the CEO of a highly funded company - do you?”.
A reference/relationship like that is worth a lot more than a project that is a little sketchy. No matter what happens, I think the intern has taken a net loss from this whole fiasco.
Its not a good way to settle disagreements by making threats as you outline here. I think your suggestion is as bad a way of handling this as the original way. Why not react positively, re-state your intent to hire the intern, say that this is indeed interesting for the company - and because of that - could you please make it not public (against a bonus) and maybe keep working on it inside repl.it.
I'll concede that it's a fuzzy line at times. But nothing I've heard so far here strikes me as justifying a belief that this case falls into "obviously theft of some kind of IP" category. OTOH, I'm biased as I am not generally a fan of the idea of "IP" in general, so there's that...
Yea, we may never know. If Replit just went ahead and filed a lawsuit and presented their case in front of an actual court, that would shed light on the legitimacy of their claims. Some posters has offered to help pay for his defense. Optics would still be pretty bad since no intern should go through that. But a little better since there would be a lot less doubt.
Unfortunately, they must now face the court of public opinion, which has not had the best track record lately.
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.
It is great feedback. Feedback that you failed to execute on in a spectacular manner. You've lost my group as customers today. In no way will I knowingly support a founder with such a broken perspective on prior art.
Toxic in what way? It's OK for the CEO to publicly fly off the handle expecting this to go away due to his big stick he now wields because he's successfully leveraged the work of giants to his own fortune?
A gracious response? No. His apology was not an apology at all. His apology can be distilled down to: "I'm sorry, but I'm still right - and I'm only sorry because the community has called me on it."
toxic in the sense of appropriateness. your response isn't crazy, but as a response to some one graciously accepting critical feedback it doesn't make much sense. frankly a top level post would have been more appropriate.
I think the specific idea at play here is that people should be able to apologize, or at least acknowledge some one criticizing them, without that becoming an avenue for attack.
I mean, do you want to participate in a scenario where the only rational response is to simply not engage?
I've been around a while and I've found that it's rather rare a person will try to intimidate or belittle a person on the same day they have an epiphany of their own failings all without external influence. In this situation the CEO is forced to confront perspective that isn't aligned with his. He's got two options at this point: the first is to acknowledge where he made mistakes and truly apologize the second is damage control - I think he attempted the latter. When you look through his history his apology is exactly as I described. His intention is to squash both problems while leaving the door open to an end game his lawyer(s) have counselled him on, potentially after the scrutiny subsides.
Also, my intention of responding in line was appropriate in my opinion. The parent to the CEOs comment was very well defined. The CEO made reference to it being good advice. In my opinion publicly acknowledging good advice without following through on it seems hypocritical. That's my opinion.
Finally, appropriateness seems to be an odd argument given all of the public inappropriateness from the CEO directly. The CEO has had many openings to right his wrong at this point, yet has not seemed to have been able to bring himself to execute on that.
He read the feedback (or at least replied) 3 hours ago. Give him time. Hopefully he’s acknowledging that comment well and we will be hearing from him again soon.
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.
They made claims and threatened legal action; certainly the public doesn’t need to legally know until a lawsuit is actually brought, but they would be required to present such evidence to the public in court.
Do they have to currently? No, of course not. But this isn’t someone claiming that another did something behind closed doors to bait public disclosure. They opened this door by making the claims, from a standpoint of whether one might want to do business with replit in the future it’s entirely reasonable to ask for proof of what otherwise are slanderous claims.
You don’t have to reveal your trade secrets in open court. They can be shown to the judge “in camera” and redacted from public filings.
If all you had to do to get a company to reveal all its secrets were to sue it on some plausible legal theory and conduct discovery, everyone would do it.
>You don’t have to reveal your trade secrets in open court
well excellent that we're not in a court here on HN or Twitter then. If he decides to intimidate someone without putting any concrete evidence up for it we're well within our rights to drag him over the coals for it. Dogs that bark don't bite, if he wanted to avoid this he should have gone to his lawyers directly, instead he's already issuing half-baked apologies in this very thread. Which means he has zilch and just wanted to bully a recent graduate into taking his product off the internet.
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.
Noncompetes are illegal and unenforceable in California, where Repl.it is incorporated. So if he signed a noncompete, it would actually be Repl.it that is in the wrong here, not him.
I am not sure they are 'illegal' - do you have a source for this? That being said, most non-competes are not enfoceable in Californina that's true. And that is a very good thing imo and a net positive for innovation.
According to the California Business and Professions Code Section 16600, “every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.”
This does not make contracts containing such clauses "illegal", but rather unenforceable in court. The student could sign a contract saying "I will not work on a company that competes with Repl.it", and he did, and the company tried to sue him over it with that as the only claim, then the court would quickly grant a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
I didn't actually know that. I stand corrected about that. But it's still arguably "morally wrong". Especially if Replit's unique design decisions and/or secrets are incorporated into this, as is claimed.
If, in fact, there were any plausible argument that it was morally wrong, we would not have a written statute specifically, actionably defending it.
Rather, making threats over what amounts to it, at someone not equipped to face even such a specious attack, is clearly and indefensibly morally wrong. Shame on Replit, and shame on you for supporting them.
Any company that has $20M in the bank but could possibly be threatened just by a new college grad coding alone does not deserve to exist. Give the money back to the investors and close up shop.
As a thought experiment, if you ran a business, and all your ex-employees released a free version of the same product, would you be cool with this? Could you hang out with them, smile and say everything is totally cool?
Or would you want to ask them to not release free versions of your paid product?
Why should people leave your company and start something new if they are happy in their position right now?
Most of the time, this kind of "exodus" happens because the business somehow mismanaged their employees which resulted in them not being happy, leaving the business and opening up a new one.
Even then, if I knew my business would be superior, I wouldn't mind that much. In the case of repl.it I don't see any reason why Riju would pose even the tiniest threat. It's super basic with no obvious plans to be compete with repl.it. Just look at the polish of both products, one is a serious business with funding secured while the other one is a small OS web-app written by somebody in their free time.
There is a small (to your point, pretty small) risk that it could be used in place of repl.it or inspire other competitors. If this was done by an outsider, this would be totally fine and healthy for consumers.
However, this is someone that the business helped out. One would hope that the person would reciprocate with positive value for the business, rather than negative value in the form of risk.
>As a thought experiment, if you ran a business, and all your ex-employees released a free version of the same product, would you be cool with this? Could you hang out with them, smile and say everything is totally cool?
I've actually seen this exact situation play out twice (except the new products were not free), though I wasn't directly involved. Both times, it only happened because the business owner was, to put it bluntly, a bad person who had no business (heh) running a company, and the result was a mass exodus that birthed a direct competitor.
To answer your thought experiment:
I am looking at this as an employee, as a controlled person. You are looking at it as a founder, owner, or some other type of position that holds power. A controller.
Those with power would view it as immoral. An action like this threatens their power. Those who have enough power to exert a controlling influence, want, above all else, to maintain that power, while also increasing it. Anything that impedes that is unfair, and thus immoral.
Those without power, or with less power, do not see it as immoral, because it is a redistribution of power to those who deserve it just as much, if not more. It is fair. It is just. It is moral.
You see this as immoral because your sympathies lie with those who have power. Might makes right. The states that enforce non-competes have the same view as you, but California does not, and that is one of the many reasons that it remains the global center of technological innovation.
Rather than looking at it from the view of an employee or founder with power, I am attempting to view it through the lens of a good relationship between two people, with this being mainly defined through the golden rule - treating others as one wants to be treated.
It would seem to me that if I hadn't chosen to train and work with this person, he probably wouldn't have chosen this exact product to release out of all the possibilities in the world.
Let's say that he had an innate inclination for this exact product and would have done it even if he hadn't worked for me. Even then, he wouldn't have been privvy to the various and more detailed information that you are exposed to as an insider.
Going forward, I would be wary of any information I share with this person, given that it could work against me. This would definitely harm our relationship, and I would wish that this person would not do this to me.
If this were a fishing village, and the main thing to do around here was fishing, I would understand. There's not much choice there. But given that there are many different things this person could have worked on besides my exact product, my reaction would be, 'really man?'
That legal threat was not a good response. I think both sides messed up here.
It seems like the ex-intern made an honest mistake especially given his age. This isn't exactly the same but Helen Keller messed up and plagiarised when she was young before. People do dumb things, especially when they're young.
The thought experiment is meant to take the situtation to the logical extreme, something that is unlikely to happen yet still realistically possible, in order to more clearly understand the effects of the behavior.
E.g. one guy littering isn't so big a deal, but it's clearer that littering is bad if everyone does it because the planet will get filthy fast.
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.
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
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.
There is https://ideone.com. I compared several similar services last year, including repl.it of course. I liked ideone better for some reason I forgot. PS: I have just checked repl.it again. Its UI has been changed a lot and it seems to require signup now, which makes me even less likely to use it.
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 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.
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.
This is what it boils down to, isn't it? No one bats an eye when an employee of some large company switches to another competitor of noticeable size.
But a single person is obviously easy to stomp into submission, and in this case it appears to have happened out of pettiness, a suspicion that is really brought home by the quick threats and the weird "work for us...no wait you were a bad co-worker anyway!" bait and switch.
Yes! It boils down to "I can pay money, so that you would need to pay money, and since I have more money, you'll go bankrupt quicker."
I'm not all too sure about American laws, but in Europe Amjad's argumentation, especially about "design decisions" is very weak. So it seems, that it's not about even having a stronger legal case. Just the ability to throw money at the problem.
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?
sorry, at what point do we have to watch this guy bully an ex intern and be OK with it? your example does not make sense and frankly you should probably not structure arguments in this way. its good for making people feel like they are wrong, its not good for convincing anyone you are right.
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.
Multiple recent companies are making the rounds with clear unethical behavior: Repl.it, TripleByte, Lambda School.
A founder seems to be unreasonably kicked from bookface. Meanwhile PG and friends show support for these actions while waxing on about how they are extremely particular about the moral compass of founders.
Eh. I don't really expect every single YC company to be a bastion of moral integrity. Startups/hackers trying to disrupt industry are gonna do unconventional shit, and that might be more morally grey than usual. Also, given that YC has _thousands_ of alumni... of course there are going to be a few bad apples. The interview is literally 10 minutes long - its not like they're doing a deep character check on founders.
All that said, Dark and Prolific being kicked out of YC yet PG apparently supporting Replit is... making me wonder why the fuck PG wrote those articles.
Wow. Unbelievable. This whole situation is so depressing. By supporting the CEO, is PG arguing that some employee from Facebook couldn't leave the company and make a better social media? This is such a stupid idea that I am almost believing that maybe I am misunderstanding my opponents. If an ex-employee declared his intent to build a similar product to my company, I would probably feel threatened, but in no way I would make any move to avoid that, otherwise I could be correctly labeled as a selfish loser. It's society that will ultimately lose if such an enterprise is faced with legal adversaries. The correct response is to continue building a better product. Fuck non-competitive agreements. People should be free to pursue their passion and what they enjoy doing.
PG will say what he needs to say for his investments to pan out. He’s even written a desperate essay on Mighty’s behalf when their reception was less than stellar. I wouldn’t read into his opinions that much.
No, I think this is unfair. I "like" most Twitter replies that make me think, even if I personally don't like it. Unless pg has said something, we can't infer any intent from a button.
Well, you can, of course. But I wouldn't bet money you're right.
It'd be interesting to know what pg thinks, since he vouched for Amjad in the first place. But the whole "X liked Y, so X endorses Z" is highly suspect logic, to put it mildly.
> 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.
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?
I'd add that its not uncommon to see same flaws that you'd naturally add when working on similar kind of product
So just saying it has the same flaws as my product by no means implies anything. Very well may mean that the other person didn't notice it or de-prioritized it, just like you when you started the project (which is why the flaw exists in my product at first place).
So a CEO bullied you. He threatened to have lawyers look at something, accused you of behaving poorly, and accused you of being difficult. He is being manipulative. He is trying to guilt / scare you into stopping. And it worked.
For all readers... do not be afraid of lawyers. Especially if nobody has even talked to them yet. Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a losing agenda. Yet they also must do what their client asks, so lawyers looking into a concern, or even sending nastygrams... those are meaningless actions. It only becomes meaningful if and when if their lawyers indicate they believe they really have a case, or if your own lawyer believes they have a case. Everything before that is posturing and bullying.
If I were in the same situation as OP, I'd state that my intent was positive, ask to be informed of the results of discussions with attorneys, and wish them to have a nice day. Admit no wrong, make no apologies, ignore irrelevant statements (in particular personal attacks), and just let it slide until they take a real action of some kind.
Once they do take an action, then it might be appropriate to do what they want. But seriously... stop letting people be bullies.