Comment by marcinzm
5 years ago
Cloning your previous employer's product doesn't seem illegal in California given the limitations on NDAs and very strong limitations on non-competes. Assuming no trade secrets or copyrighted information was used which would be easy to verify in an open source project. Merely having information about a company's internals in your head does not make it illegal to work for or start competitors.
And maybe that’s the answer here. Or maybe the legal and moral boundaries don’t coincide. But the facts of the case haven’t changed, so there’s no reason you’d expect any genuinely held opinion to have changed.