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.
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.
> 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.
Not sure what they'll do if another company decides to reinvent it.. but /shrug
(to be clear, not defending them at all)
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.
> 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.
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.
There was respect shown.
Replit is not that innovative or the pioneer of this idea - many have done this so many times before
Wit this silly logic, nobody can ever work for a compeitor.
Was Zoom's CEO unprofessional for starting Zoom after working so long in WebEx? How about Jet.com founder after working at Amazon?
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.
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
hUHH ???
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.
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.
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?
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.
Vague general ideas like "a car" or "140 character limit" are not property, and so cannot be stolen.
Acting this way is superbly entitled.
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.
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.