If that's all they did it wouldn't be so bad. However, they also discussed the project, future improvements, etc with the strong implication that they would hir

If that's all they did it wouldn't be so bad. However, they also discussed the project, future improvements, etc with the strong implication that they would hire him or pay for his work so far. This could have been well intentioned but you can't tell from the outside and people tend to default to assuming bad things about actions taken by large companies.