Yea, I agree that his blogpost was more colorful, but his emails to the company seemed totally fine. He's basically just asking them for more or less a favor that they are not obliged to honor (like you pointed out), but is all this really worth the bad PR?
The part that really bothers me is that one of the reasons they give for denying him this is a recent engineering mistake. It just feels like this is all out of spite, and it's more of a childish move more than anything.
- "Impeccable logic."
- ' At this point. You might as well just tell me "fuck you. you didn't sign a contract. boohoo." '
- ' I was starting to feel like they were determined to screw me.'
- 'No. I'm not proud of threatening, but I was pissed.'
- ' The rest of this chain of emails consists of me double checking if he understood what I was saying, and him giving me some more BS.'
- 'This is unethical practice. Period.'
- 'Somrat. Tim. Was this worth the 10k?'