The company didn't get a lawyer involved and force him to take it down, they expressed concern - the author apparently agrees that it's related or similar to work he did while an employee, or there would have been a bit more argument than "oh, ok".
What you're proposing would of course be fine - the company isn't claiming 'ownership' of that code, just suggesting that it might be infringing. But I don't get the impression that they're using that charting library, just similar code written by the same author. They wouldn't be hurt by that at all.
...my fault, should of A-OK'ed everything before putting it online. Didn't expect anywhere near that sort of reaction though. (from the author's twitter feed)
Sounds kinda fierce to me. I suspect if he'd refused, lawyers wouldn't be far behind. Perhaps I'm just jaded. I've seen some pretty egregious overstepping by companies in my time.
I'm still calling it a dick move. A great deal of what makes him valuable to them, he likely learned at home doing this sort of thing. He may even be driving the product's direction somewhat with his personal exploration.
Didn't Expect anywhere near that sort of reaction though
I read that as reaction to the project by the public (i.e., tons of page views), not as the reaction of his employer. It's quite possible that his company was quite friendly about the issue.
While it's unfortunate to lose an open-source project, there is not enough information to know whether Nick or his employer is the overstepping their bounds.
Not if the company are claiming ownership (even in the vaguest of ways) of the code and think there is some value in it - in that case "destroying" it could be a remarkably bad thing to do.
[NB I have been involved in litigation over ownership of code and although we were 100% in the right it was an appallingly stressful experence - mostly because logic seemed to go completely out the window once things turned nasty].
Destroy might not mean quite what I'd hoped in this context. I more meant make completely inaccesible to everyone. If the employer claims exclusive ownership, require the overtime pay before you allow them to benefit from it again.
No matter what you signed as an employee, OSHA(1) has rules about how long you are required to work without overtime. Its a clever end run I've seen used around "we own everything you do at any time" BS that employment contracts often have in them. Yes, they may own it, but they will have to pay for the time taken to create it. Usually when faced with a big bill, thy decided it wasn't so important to own it after all.
(1) Sorry, that was dumb. OSHA just enforces some of these rules. The rules are actually The Fair Labor Standards Act.
I am only guessing from the contents of the post, but it sounds like they were asserting possible infringement against his own previous work, not ownership of the library he developed on his own time. It is best to be careful though, I much agree.
They'd have a tough time proving ownership of that code unless he was also using it in one of their applications, but that crap can get very complicated.
The company didn't get a lawyer involved and force him to take it down, they expressed concern - the author apparently agrees that it's related or similar to work he did while an employee, or there would have been a bit more argument than "oh, ok".
What you're proposing would of course be fine - the company isn't claiming 'ownership' of that code, just suggesting that it might be infringing. But I don't get the impression that they're using that charting library, just similar code written by the same author. They wouldn't be hurt by that at all.