For those calling Amjad's apology insincere: what would convince you otherwise? He's stated plainly that he did x, x was wrong, and he's sorry for doing x (x being making legal threats and abusing his power). Do you need him to concede his entire point of view 100%? If Riju really did copy repl.it, are you saying he should let that go in order to make a proper apology? Why is that a reasonable demand?

I think I see one part of the problem, though. Many people implicitly believe the claim about Riju copying repl.it is itself ridiculous. So I want to talk about this.

It's famously said that execution is worth more than ideas. Meaning a large part of a company's value is in its acquired knowledge from iterating on designs and the paths they landed on. Imagine everyone who sets out to create an online code runner starts at the same point in the online-code-runner problem space. Every decision you make is uncharted territory, and every choice, small UI changes, how you serialize messages, how you orchestrate containers, has consequences.

When you take the result of those learnings -- a very specific design path -- and copy it, it can seem like you were just doing the obvious thing, precisely because the first company carved that path first. It seems like nothing, and you'll never enforce it in law. But what you're doing is basically pirating the encoded knowledge from all those iterations and trial-and-error cycles; instead of starting from the initial point in the problem space and independently reasoning at each point what direction to "step" in, you teleport right to the same spot as the company, getting for free any progress they've made.

Saying there are a bunch of repl.it clones, etc. misses the point. The "online code runner" idea is cheap. That's not what Amjad is saying. It's not even about individually patentable trade secrets. It's more like, we've been iterating in this problem space for a long time, an intern comes in, sees the path we took, leaves and releases something that takes largely the same path, then tries to claim the path is just "the obvious route." But anyone who's worked on a long, hard problem knows that's not how it works. A million micro design decisions go into eventually arriving at the path you take. It's all the more suspicious if they made all the same micro-mistakes you did (as Amjad claims). What are the odds they started at the initial point, independently reasoned through each sub-decision, and made the same "steps" in the problem space you did, mistakes intact?

It may not be legally enforceable, but I think it's very morally shady.

I'm not saying Riju did copy repl.it, by the way, just that it's not a completely crazy accusation. And I don't think Radon's blog post definitively proves he didn't. It goes through his tech stack in a very accounting-like, line-by-line breakdown. But it doesn't address my point above, the point I think (can't speak for him) Amjad was trying to make.

So if Amjad saying "I still think you crossed a line ethically, but I apologize for reacting by making legal threats and abusing power" -- which is, actually, the entire thing he did wrong -- strikes you as insincere, what's the right way for him to assert his own moral grievance here before this whole matter wraps up?