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by grinich 1963 days ago
I hate to have to do this, but given this is a rip-off of a WorkOS product I feel I need to step in here. (I'm the founder of WorkOS.)

Sam and Michael were both brief employees at WorkOS in 2020 where they contributed to our product and were privy to our full codebase, strategy, and roadmap. (We are very transparent internally.)

Both of them were let go from the company. Sam then decided to start working on this open source clone of WorkOS. There are striking similarities in the API structure and architecture of Osso, enough to clearly not be coincidence. Our lawyers sent him a cease and desist but he has persisted working on the project.

This is an unfortunate situation and it’s disappointing to see Sam misrepresent the origins of the Osso project. (He even took WorkOS off his LinkedIn.)

Personally I’m a big fan of open source and open source based business models. (I was responsible for open sourcing Nylas Mail and the underlying Nylas Sync Engine while I was CEO there.) But this form of blatantly ripping someone else’s work and passing it off as your own just isn’t right.

We’re prepared to pursue legal action against Osso if needed, but honestly we’ve just been too focused on growing WorkOS. Today WorkOS is already powering enterprise SSO for a bunch of big companies and also many startups/SMBs and growing quickly. We’re also SOC 2 Type 2 certified and super well funded (unannounced rounds) with a fantastic team.

So I’m posting this mostly to call-out bad behavior and to stand up for our team’s hard work. They deserve it.

More background on WorkOS for those curious:

- WorkOS “Show HN” launch (March 2020): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607402

- Our recent Fall Release (Nov 2020): https://youtu.be/JP-9wVoqy4A

- “Crossing the Enterprise Chasm” (August 2019): https://youtu.be/IR2QZQrzoiA

- WorkOS API Docs: https://workos.com/docs

3 comments

So Osso is a not only a potentially litigated piece of work but they are also easily misrepresenting some open source terms!!

This product reminded of your show HN quite honestly but I just couldn't remember the name.

Rooting for WorkOS.

And I thought they were improperly profiting off the term 'open source'. But they also are (allegedly) ripping-off another's work? That's not cool at all.
WorkOS feels like a super thin layer over already OS libraries. How much do they really ripp off?