Freedur Fight: Will the real Freedur please stand up?

In August, Chris said, he finally decided to terminate his relationship with the other team and redevelop the app from scratch with two other people (presumably, the Vincent Shen and Rick Olson mentioned by Obrad and Frank).

[Paul] Hay’s [the development leader] team is claiming that I am reverse engineering their software. On the contrary, all Freedur customers should know that 1) Freedur is our software, holding the source code hostage does not make it theirs and 2) the proxy/VPN technology has been open source for years and there is nothing proprietary about it. The true intellectual property of Freedur is its intuitive interface design and disciplined viral marketing that was devised and excuted by me personally.

At this point, Hay’s team has taken control of the Freedur Twitter and Facebook accounts. Both websites have been contacted and I expect to regain control of the Twitter account shortly.

I am currently taking all necessary action to restore service to our customers as quickly as possible. It is important all Freedur customers are aware that Hay’s team is attempting to create a cloned service of Freedur in an attempt to steal its customers. However, I am confident that while they can duplicate the code, they cannot duplicate Freedur’s design and intuitiveness.

I would urge our customers to not fall for their tactics by signing on to their new service, and please wait patiently as we re-launch Freedur. The new Freedur service will be completed in approximately 1 week. I have included screenshots of “Freedur 2.0” that will soon be released.

Now, hit the magic switch on your proxy, vpn and check out the version on China's internet, which redirects you to the Freedur Blog. StackFile, a company which claims to own Freedur, writes:

Chris claims in the letter above that we (StackFile Corporation) have hijacked our own service and our own servers, that he just hired us (StackFile Corporation) to make a software for him. That is a blatant lie.

StackFile Corporation is not a programming firm and does not offer programming services. StackFile does file hosting, personal file storage and proxy service as part of its business.

Does Chris have some contracts signed with us which can confirm his lies that he has hired us as programming firm? Of course not. He is a blatant liar and a thief.

They say that they had decided to launch an experimental project that turned a proxy program into an easy to use package for the Asian market. Chris Mathews was a friend who had some experience as a designer and was therefore asked to design all the images on the Freedur site and app. When he came to China, he was asked to sign on as the marketing head for the region.

They point to us to back them up. (Since we've been cited, this is what we'll state: The ONLY thing we can confirm is that Chris bought ad space from us. We can't confirm that StackFile owns Freedur - in fact we'd never heard of them until two weeks ago, or that Chris was just a marketing rep. We're not saying he wasn't, we're just saying this is all we know for sure.)

Because our money is stolen, and Chris holds the money, we will ask this time all customers whose record is lost due to Chris sabotage, to fill a dispute on PayPal for a full refund (You can select reason: “I’m not satisfied by the product as it doesn’t provide all features it advertises on its declaration “).

Despite of this, after the money is refunded, we will be happy to provide free service to all damaged customers at our own expense in duration not shorter than 1 month.

Yikes. The internet is serious business.