How Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

submited by
Style Pass
2021-06-07 16:30:07

Hi, my name is Radon. I graduated college last year and now work as a software engineer in DevOps/Infrastructure. In my free time, I also maintain a number of open-source projects.

While I was in college, I interned at the startup Replit. This blog post is the story of how Replit is using legal threats and their venture-capital funding to bully me into shutting down an open-source project they don’t like.

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.

I worked for Replit in Summer 2019, where I was asked to rebuild Replit’s package management stack and make it open-source. If you like reading about tech stuff, here’s the post I wrote for Replit’s blog, and here’s the code on GitHub.

I took a job elsewhere in Summer 2020, but still chatted with them occasionally by email when they reached out to tell me about something cool Replit had developed.

Leave a Comment