Back in the 1990s, this was Computer Associates entire business model: buy software that was past it's peak but still had active, paying users; Slap a CA logo on it; start charging through the nose.
It's like a protection racket. You need that software, possibly have no good alternatives, and CA knew that. They rarely seemed to put much effort into maintaining anything either.
I am surprised it's not a more popular business model now.
Oracle does this too. They buy small companies with vertical line of business software with a lot of happy users and then raise prices and make it harder to integrate or switch away.
Insurance has a number of niche software products where this has happened. The license fee goes up by 1000%, with zero investment in the product. It takes companies a decade to get off, and the new owners enjoy the proceeds in the meantime.
In the open source world, Akka, the most popular actor system library in the JVM ecosystem, that’s heavily used in tonnes of open source projects, recently went from “free and open source” to “paid/proprietary and source available.” https://github.com/akka/akka/pull/31561
Same strategy - the pricing is insanely high (for a library), and the project is effectively dead now, but it’ll take some larger enterprises awhile to move away from.
I find it especially sleazy due to the nature of transitive dependencies in open source. For example, somebody creates a popular open source lib out of their own sense of good will, let’s call it “Foo lib.” It depends on Akka, all is fine for years, then all of the sudden Typelevel (Akka maintainers) say “physche, Akka is proprietary now, Foo lib users now owe us $$$.” Gross.
Opensource licenses don't allow that... The most an evil maintainer can do is make new versions of a library be expensive. For things like GPL code an evil maintainer can add in code that checks a license key and only runs if said key is present. Or add a dependency on a closed source component.
You still have a right to use the old version forever for free. And that's what any business in this position should do - just make a 'maintenance only' fork.
Yes, but not for long. Typelevel will patch the last open source version (2.6) with critical security updates for the next year (until Sept 2023), but not afterwards.
Oh jeez. I'm no lawyer, but well copyleft sure sounds nice right now. I'd imagine if it was GPL it couldn't be relicensed incompatibly because the new version is still derived from the old one, right?
I think it's still very popular, but the companies involved do a better job hiding themselves. Idera and Scaleworks aren't super well-known names, sometimes even if you're stuck on one of their subsidiary products.
To be fair CA did a good job of fixing any bugs in the products they bought. But that was about it along with increasing the price. To make it work they had to keep acquiring companies. In the end even that wasn't enough so they ended up engaging in fraud to keep their stock price climbing.
We've just found a new dress to stuff Corporate Raiding into.
In the 1980's, when you weren't worrying about the someone accidentally starting WWIII, Japan completely unraveling the American Industrial Complex, Dungeons and Dragons turning your kids into satanists, marijuana turning your kids into crackheads (1980's meth epidemic) or treating your child's ADHD not being a sign of responsibility but declaring moral bankruptcy on your terrible parenting skills, you had to worry about your company's hard assets being worth more than your market cap, and a bunch of people staging a hostile takeover so they could sell your company for scrap to release that 'value' that is really your rainy day fund.
See also "Other People's Money" starring Danny DeVito as a corporate raider/Pinocchio character.
Maybe the money went out of being a patent troll, so they are trying a new model? Buy a once loved, but now defunct, product and try it on with everyone on their massive mailing list. Maybe enough suckers will pay to make it worthwhile?
The thing that sucks is not taking care of your customers. There are plenty of small vendors out there where alternatives are limited that still provide good customer service. These vendors may even charge a premium price for their niche service, but they don't exploit merely because they can. There was a great article the other day on the floppydisk.com. It seems like he has a few customers totally reliant on legacy disk where could probably change 100x his current rates. But they'd hate him for it. It also would alienate anyone not held ransom and accelerate migration efforts. Instead he provides a good service, supports hobbyists, and has pivoted his business model several times over the decades to support customer demand.
Pissing off your customers isn't good business if you want to keep them long term or maintain a reputation (in order to gain new customers or expand into different business-lines).
> I am surprised it's not a more popular business model now.
I mean, it's pretty popular? Basically what happened to Travis CI, right?
There's a spectrum of how bad it can be (how much they raise prices, how far maintenance/support drops), but it's kind of what "equity partners" generally do with purchased software companies.
P/E ratios are so wild now that you need to be able to extract an extraordinary amount of money in the 3-5 years before people finally manage to migrate off your platform, to pay off the initial purchase.
It's like a protection racket. You need that software, possibly have no good alternatives, and CA knew that. They rarely seemed to put much effort into maintaining anything either.
I am surprised it's not a more popular business model now.