Freelance dev here (EU). A startup I was in partnership talks with came to me with an idea for a tool. Their own dev attempted a first version that was slow, buggy, and honestly barely functional. I rebuilt it from scratch in my own time, own repo, no contract, never got paid. The idea was theirs, the code is mine. Partnership fell through. I offered them a cheap non-exclusive license so they could keep using and commercializing my version. They declined and said they’d build their own. Yest...