[treesprite82]

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.

[pbecotte]

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)