I gather the author is UK based and working for a UK company. I imagine 'misunderstand' might be a polite way of saying 'we realised that our decision has caused a lot of negative publicity and we are changing our mind'. That is how it works in organisations I have worked for in the past. Or then again, the author could literally have mistaken what the manager said.

I read that might as dripping with sarcasm... it's highly unlikely he would have taken it down if they hadn't flipped the bitch switch and now that the internet militia is tracking them down they flipped it all the way to nice.

That seems less of a polite way of saying, and more like a butt-covering lie. Am I supposed to understand from 'misunderstand' that the company might be climbing down from a stupid mistake it made, or actually be misled?

It's not necessarily any of your business. The code is back, why do you need to know the full and whole truth about his dealings with his employer? And what's wrong with letting someone save a bit of face when they came out on the right end of something after all?

Thank you.

It is nobody's business here but Nick's what happened. Take his words at face value and assume he misunderstood his boss unless you have reason to believe otherwise and it actually matters.

> It's not necessarily any of your business

I think this is wrong, Nick initally posted to the Internet - without caveat's - I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask question's and intrigue.

> Am I supposed to understand from 'misunderstand' that the company might be climbing down from a stupid mistake it made, or actually be misled?

No, and you are not supposed to be able to understand. Otherwise being polite and claiming to have misunderstood something wouldn’t make any sense, as it would be equivalent to blaming the company directly.

I have no idea about this specific case at all.

Could be either a genuine case of the author hearing one thing and the company meaning another, or a change of mind by the company, possibly involving higher ups.

In some societies, a "butt-covering lie" is politeness.

The employer probably wanted to talk to him about it, to decide whether there really was enough similar tech (or even shared code) that it might harm the company. That's basic due diligence.

Probably after going over it, they determined that it would present no harm. Notice that this was not a legal process, just an employer and developer communicating.

It wouldn't always be that clear cut. His employer's policy might be something like "outside projects are allowed as long as you don't use knowledge that you gained from working there".

That could easily be interpreted more broadly than it was intended. He could interpret it as "I learned Javascript while working there, so I can't release a project in Javascript" or something like that, when they really intended it to prevent use of non-publicly available information related to their business.

Well, what it means is he thought that he couldn't, but then he found out that his understanding was wrong, and he actually could.