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.

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.

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.

And yet you haven’t managed to tell anyone what these “invisible” aspects are. So it kind of just sounds like you’re making things up.

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.

>"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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27135573

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.

Max Shawabkeh was one of the first engineers working on Repl.it and is hardly given any credit

This is a talk he gave back in 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfxH-JDF7Xk&t=81s

https://replit.com/talk/ask/Who-is-Max-Shawabkeh/26386

Utterly appalling. It was only a matter of time when all this would catch up with you.

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.

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?

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.

Ethical lines are not legally relevant.

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).

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.

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.

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?

http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html

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.

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?

It seems worse to keep quiet if you are being bullied by a well-known and respected person/entity more powerful than you.

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.

Seems like outside observers mostly don't agree.

Hard disagree with this one. The other options are to either give in to an aggressive threat or take the risk to get sued into oblivion.

This is the only defense for someone in their position against an aggressor with millions and lawyers, the power differential is huge.

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.

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.

This is one side of the story, we don't have much evidence either direction, and it's not clear there was any "cheating" involved in anyone's past.

HN should do better.