Karen Ceo Fired Me For Taking Sick Leave.. Forgot I Own The Source Code!

“I’m just complying with our agreement. I didn’t write those clauses; your predecessor signed them.”

“You’re fired!”

she shouted.

“You cannot still pretend that you have power here.”

“I’m not pretending anything,”

I said.

“I’m simply following the terms of the contract you decided to ignore. If you want to discuss a new license, we can talk. If not, the license terminates after the notice period. That’s how it works.”

“You are blackmailing us!”

she hissed.

“I’m enforcing a contract,”

I replied.

“If you think it’s illegal, feel free to talk to your lawyers.”

She then hung up.

Then the founder called me, sounding exhausted.

“Why are you doing this?”

he asked.

“I’m not the one who fired me for going to the doctor,”

I said.

“I sent reminders about the unpaid invoices and nobody listened. Now I’m just following the steps in the contract.”

He sighed.

“Can’t you just let it go?”

he asked.

“I could,”

I said.

“But then what? I get fired for being sick, lose my IP, and they keep using my software for free? If you want to buy out the code or sign a new license, we can talk. But I’m not giving it away because your new director hates old people.”

He was quiet for a long time.

“I will try to talk to her,”

he said.

“Good luck with that,”

I said and meant it.

The 30 days passed. Nothing was negotiated and no payment landed in my little company’s bank account.

Karen sent one snarky email about how they considered my so-called license invalid. But the investors never replied to me directly.

On day 31, I opened my license server dashboard. There in a neat list were all the production servers belonging to my old company.

Each one had an active key, and there was a button next to each entry saying “terminate license.” My finger hovered over the mouse for a second.

I took a deep breath and clicked. Nothing dramatic happened on my end—no explosion or smoke—just the system quietly marking their keys as expired.

The real chaos started on their side the next morning. I didn’t see it firsthand, obviously, but I heard about it later from my old colleagues.

People arrived at the office, opened the logistics system, and were greeted with a bright red banner saying,

“License invalid. Please contact the vendor.”

All the workflows were blocked. Dispatchers couldn’t create new shipments, accountants couldn’t generate invoices, and the customs department couldn’t print the forms they needed.

The phone started ringing, first inside the office and then from clients. One of my former teammates messaged me from his personal phone.

“Did you do something?”

he wrote.

“I did exactly what the contract says. Your license expired,”

I replied.

“Bro,”

he wrote.

“She’s going insane.”

Apparently, Karen gathered everyone in the meeting room and started shouting about sabotage and criminal acts. She ordered the IT team to fix it right now.

They opened the admin dashboard and saw the same message: the license was invalid, please contact the vendor. Karen of course ordered them to bypass it, but it didn’t work.

That’s when she sent me another email.

“You’re hereby ordered to immediately restore functionality to the software you illegally disabled,”

she wrote.

“If you don’t comply, we will file criminal charges.”

I replied from my company email, short and dry.

“As per clause XYZ of the license agreement, your license has terminated due to non-payment and termination of my role as consultant without cause,”

I wrote.

“I have not disabled anything beyond enforcing the license terms. I’m willing to negotiate a new license or buy out the IP at fair market value. Please have your legal representative contact me. Best regards, OP,”

the email stated.

Her reply was basically a wall of insults, accusations that I was extorting them, and some colorful comments about old men who think they’re irreplaceable. I didn’t answer that one; let her talk to the lawyers that she kept mentioning.

Meanwhile, the real world didn’t care about her emails. Clients started to feel the pain.

Trucks were sitting loaded because nobody could print dispatch documents. Invoices were delayed, which meant payments were delayed and the whole chain started to choke.

A couple of big clients called me directly.

“OP, what’s going on over there?”

one asked.

“We cannot get anything done. The system says something about a license.”

“Sorry, I’m not with them anymore,”

I said honestly.

“They terminated my contract. The software license ended with it.”

“So what now?”

he asked.

“Well, I still own the software through my company. I can offer you a separate hosted version directly if you want, but I won’t do anything behind their back. If you decide to stop working with them and come to me, that’s your choice,”

I explained.

He said he would think about it. I didn’t push it; I didn’t want to be the villain here.

But things got worse for my old company. Investors finally woke up when one of them tried to check their dashboards during a meeting and got the same license error.

They summoned Karen and the founder for an urgent discussion. Later, I heard from my friend in accounting that the meeting didn’t go well.

Apparently, she had told the board that the “old guy” signed everything over and there’s nothing he can do. When they put the original contract on the table and pointed at the clause, her face allegedly went very still.

Of course, she tried to blame me anyway.

“He is sabotaging us,”

she said.

“Just hire another developer to rebuild it.”

One of the investors apparently asked very quietly,

“How long do you think that would take?”

She said something like a couple of months. The founder bless him finally grew a spine and said it took him years.

In the meantime, my life was weirdly calm. I was still technically recovering, though the stress didn’t help.

Suddenly I had time. I walked by the sea with my wife, drank tea in the evenings, and re-watched some old movies.

I also started to sketch out an idea I’d had in the back of my mind for a while. What if I rebuilt the whole platform from scratch, cleaner and better, and offered it as a service through my own company?

I was not planning to do it just to spite them, honestly. The old codebase was becoming a mess; we had been patching it forever instead of doing things properly because nobody wanted to risk downtime.

But now I had a chance to do it right. So I opened a new repo, created a fresh project, and started building a simple, modular, cloud-friendly system.

I knew exactly what features people actually use nowadays and what was just decorations for demos. I focused on the core shipments, invoices, customs forms, tracking—the boring stuff that makes money.