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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like they broke, or tried to break, his leg. Seems reasonable to me to want to fight back.

Honestly to me, it sounds like a junior (or at least, a non-business-savvy) person tried to extort somewhere in the area of $3.5 million from the owner of their company.

In this instance, "trying to break his leg" may have been more like "got shoved and fell over" (Which to be fair, could be a reaction someone might have if their employee came into their office demanding several million dollars - who knows).

I don't know, I'd like to hear the other side of the story.

I was kinda more thinking the other person kicked a garbage can or chair and it banged the authors knee or something. Had similar happen at a start up years ago and seems more plausible than being attacked.

If he were attacked like I think he wanted it to sound then a lawsuit would probably get him the money he wanted

Junior? He has worked on the codebase since 2015 alone, then Aeternity stole his code and raised 77 million USD entirely based on his own work. He is the sole reason the company even exists so definitely not junior. And they stealing his code and starting a company based on it was how they got started so they are clearly not nice people.

Junior/younger/etc. Don't need to get too caught up in the terminology.

They also didn't 'steal' his code from the sounds of it. It sounds like he was in some form of verbal partnership to help develop a company (which they were clearly fairly far along with) but hadn't signed any real contracts. After two years someone isn't stealing your code, and you should be savvy enough to realise that the business world isn't really about being nice people - you need to cover your bases.

I don't care about terminology/title. That's irrelevant. My point is that the company raised 77 million of dollars based entirely on technology invented by this developer. Him asking to own a small part of that is totally reasonable.

I agree that he should have signed a proper contract with them and not rely on verbal agreements (but after reading little bit about him online he seems to be some sort of extreme libertarian, he doesn't believe in lawyers and contracts, just in voluntary exchanges).

But that doesn't mean it's not a bit evil for the company to just throw him away after using his name and technology to get people invest in them.

Yes, I agree about stealing the code. They did not literally do it as it seems they had some verbal agreement and he worked on the code for them voluntarily. But still they haven't paid him anything and I think if he actually decided to get a lawyer and sue he has a pretty strong claim on the company ownership as the whole funding round was based on his IP.

The company has hastily deleted all his code and replaced it with new repositories starting from scratch so apparently they are also at least little bit worried he might legally be entitled to own part of the company.

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