But, the developer was wrong, and angry, and selfish.
Did you guys actually read his emails? The company emailed him very nicely, explaining that they had a project coming up and would like to use the name that is part of their company. The dev responded by "no I'm using it for a project". Didn't even try to work with them. The company then replied basically saying "Look, we don't want to fight you on this - we have the name trademarked - surely we can work this out between us?"
The dev then responded like an asshole.
Like, seriously? Way to escalate the situation. After a final plea by the company (to not involve lawyers and to resolve this reasonably), the dev responds with "Give me $30,000 for it".
Damn son. You really think it's worth that much? He's acting like one of those people who snag a domain that a business would obviously want, and yet demand like $1 Million dollars for it.
I honestly don't have any sympathy for this guy. He could have renamed his project. Why was it even called kik in the first place? Did he really need to keep that name? Was it crucial to the project or the branding on the project? The guy acted like a spoiled child who didn't get his way. He was outright rude from the start, and he made ZERO effort to resolve this reasonably or to make a compromise.
Frankly, I'm sure the company WOULD have paid him something for the name, if he had actually been open to working with them on it.
And then he removes his entire published codebase? He basically "rage-quit". Very mature.
