An employee of a company left, and then made an open source clone of the company's software. The fact that the software was easy to clone or that others had done it previously doesn't seem really relevant. Several times I have left a company, and I could replicate a good percentage of it in a couple days too, not because it was easy, but because the months/years of experience I had building it the first time.
Whipping out the lawyers and bragging about his funding is idiotic and childish, but I think asking for the project to be taken down is completely reasonable. (on that note- I kind of think at this point that you have to be a megalomaniac to be a funded startup founder)
But the point is, it's not an open source clone of anything proprietary. Their proprietary stuff is the collaborative capability they have added, accounts, sharing, etc. The stuff the intern replicated is a bunch of non-proprietary open source stuff (that they themselves open sourced), and he went well beyond what replit does by supporting hundreds of languages. They have zero chance legally of going anywhere with this other than scaring a small project out of existence. There is no case.
I hear you, but I'm curious about why the response of legal threats weighs less heavily on your heart than anything else here? That seems like a big deal and probably the biggest deal here.
I mean, can you imagine a world where the email was "Hey that is great work, but I'm worried this is stepping on our toes a little. Can you take that project down?".
And then honestly the more I think about it the "why dont we offer you a job!" -> "most difficult intern we had" (note: quotes not intended to imply literal quote here) is really troubling.
The knowledge of something in your head belongs to you, not a previous employer. Silicon Valley was founded and continues to flourish because employees at large companies go "I can do this better myself", and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Bad take. It's not a clone, for the reasons explained in the article. It's more akin to the multitude of "run code online" sites that already existed before Replit was started.
Unless I’m misunderstanding something, the company’s software is already open source (https://github.com/replit), so cloning it is perfectly reasonable.
If there’s any dispute here, I think it would be over the copyright to the cloned code (if it really is a clone), but the article doesn’t mention anything about that, so I suspect it isn’t actually cloned at all.
If the project is "no more similar to Replit than the 15 other (commercial!) ones you can find on Google by searching “run python online” or “online programming environment”." and uses none of Replit's internal design decisions, then I don't think it's fair to call it a clone.
I am just taking the author at their word though. Could turn out that they copy-pasted large chunks of non-FOSS code from Replit or something.
The emails from the company make it clear that at least one party to the dispute believed that they did use Replit's internal design decisions. Commercial companies approaching the same problem certainly would offer similar feature sets. But an employee reading the source code and then starting a git repo that makes a working version of the product freely available is a pretty big deal. It doesn't have to be copy-pasted to be valuable intellectual property. (though, I do agree that THIS was unlikely to actually be valuable IP haha)
I'm with you on this, reading the article I can't help but think the author is being intentionally naive about the situation and feelings on both sides. If anything, to me this reads like viral marketing to get the project off the ground.
The author builds a clone of a product for a former company, shares the project with the CEO, and expects them to be happy with it? And "out of nowhere" they are suddenly displeased with the project and (rightfully IMO) feel like some of it was copied from their business. What universe does this person live in? It's a fair point that several other competitors copy the UI and I'm not suggesting this is illegal or disallowed, just that there's a huge lack of common sense to think a former company would be happy to see a project like this.
The author is digging a further hole by making all this public, it's not a good look IMO. I'm all for competition but there's a severe lack of tact here.
> If anything, to me this reads like viral marketing to get the project off the ground.
That's assuming it is a "project" to "get off the ground" in the first place. What gave you the impression that this was something the author was going to try and take commercial? I never got that impression.
> It's a fair point that several other competitors copy the UI and I'm not suggesting this is illegal or disallowed
But you are suggesting it was that way around. I didn't quite see that either; on the contrary, I got a kind of distinct impression that some of these other projects predate Replit, including its UI design.
> That's assuming it is a "project" to "get off the ground" in the first place. What gave you the impression that this was something the author was going to try and take commercial? I never got that impression.
Experience. It's all too easy to say "oh I didn't _plan_ to make a business" and later on say "well with this overwhelming support I'd be stupid _not_ to make it a business."
> But you are suggesting it was that way around. I didn't quite see that either; on the contrary, I got a kind of distinct impression that some of these other projects predate Replit, including its UI design.
Oh sorry I did not mean to suggest Replit was the original creator of this UI, as you mentioned it looks like they all copy each other, I'll update my post. That's beside my point though. I will point out it's rather disingenuous of the author to not include a side-by-side comparison of Riju/Replit, instead he posts pictures of some other projects.
Why? Assuming that there isn't a non-compete signed by the former employee, the (former) employee has the right to use all their skills and knowledge to do whatever they want on the free market.
This wouldn't be an issue of non-compete, but of intellectual property - and I can't imagine there was no intellectual property agreement signed. I've never had a job that didn't have one...
General ideas (such as most of repl.it stuff) isn't covered by IP. I doubt that the (former) employee copied exact code in this case. It seems to me that he re-implemented some vaguely similar functionality. Moreover, most of that stuff existed before repl.it...
If the intern was pursuing this project as a business, then I could sympathize with legal threats. But this is clearly a passion project. Why make such a big fuss over a side project?
An employee of a company left, and then made an open source clone of the company's software. The fact that the software was easy to clone or that others had done it previously doesn't seem really relevant. Several times I have left a company, and I could replicate a good percentage of it in a couple days too, not because it was easy, but because the months/years of experience I had building it the first time.
Whipping out the lawyers and bragging about his funding is idiotic and childish, but I think asking for the project to be taken down is completely reasonable. (on that note- I kind of think at this point that you have to be a megalomaniac to be a funded startup founder)