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.
That's my unsolicited .02
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
