Hacker News Reader

My biggest fear at the moment is that they will turn around in the future and try to take action against me. If they are telling others that they wrote the code, and if someone tells them about my code, i wouldn't want to face a legal battle. Maybe it's unfounded, but I'm still a bit emotional.

View on HN

That's probably a healthy approach, especially if you're feeling emotional about the situation right now. There's definitely not a big rush.

Keep in mind that it is very unlikely they'll try to litigate against you——they're the ones who have the most to lose. Not only could they potentially have violated your copyright, but they also risk significant perceived damage (many VCs won't touch a startup in litigation with a 10 foot pole).

Is it on GitHub? If you have the commit log on a third-party site, you've got a pretty reliable audit trail of who wrote what when.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com