Fogbugz going pay-only with little notice was discussed previously at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32874311.

A preposterous business practice, and incredibly frustrating. I don't know what can be done about companies acting poorly in this way, though.

Class-action lawsuit for attempted fraud? (charging money for a free account looks like fraud to me, but IANAL, much less in the US...)

Yeah came here after reading the article to say, this seems like vanilla fraud.

I only just got the first email. I guess they are sending them in batches.

I got an email stating I would be charged but I don't even remember what FogBugz is, I couldn't log into any account and no password reset came my way. I really don't want to deal with these charges out of no where.

(I guess this is mostly meditating on what the original builders of software feel when their products, which they poured love and care into, end up in the afterlife of software.)

I've sometimes worried about the fate of my businesses after selling them, in the event they pass through many hands, but that's part of the risk of selling. I got an email from a customer of ~10 years ago complaining that they couldn't reach the current CS team (site was down) and asking if I had a direct contact. It, luckily, came back up; it was not obvious to me that it would.

On the one hand, frustrating as a founder, but on the other hand, no rational person expects someone to grind out support emails for an employer they haven't worked at in 10 years, right? I get that e.g. a teacher is inconvenienced, but the Unified School District of Middle America is inconvenienced that there are homework assignments not graded right now. and they don't get to call people 10 years into retirement and say "Well you worked here once upon a time and these assignments aren't going to grade themselves."

Hi Patrick, Just to be clear, I'm absolutely not blaming Joel or previous FogBugz employees for this state of affairs. But I know I would be deeply hurt if one of my products was bought by someone who tried these sort of dark practices on my one-time customers.

Ps/ Well done on the recent 'Planet Money' podcast appearance.

Some colour: Joel made both Andy (hermitcrab) and Patrick (patio11) mods on the old Business of Software forum back in the day. This is a great echo.

The Internet is a very tiny place at times.

Yep, not worried at all, just talking through somewhat complex feelings here. (Andy and I know each other well, folks, if this isn’t obvious from context. Relevantly, we met on Fog Creek’s forums back in 2006 or so.)

>we met on Fog Creek’s forums back in 2006 or so

Happy days! ;0)

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.

Couldn't they just not upgrade the Akka dep?

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.

Then they should maintain it themselves, or pay the maintainers what they are asking for

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?

Has anyone started a fork from the last Apache licensed version?

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.

https://money.cnn.com/2006/04/24/technology/kumar/index.htm

I didn't realise that is what happened so thanks for the link.

There's currently some concern in IT circles that Broadcom is intending something similar to "The CA Business Model" with their vmware acquisition. :(

Broadcom bought CA, so they have experience with it first hand.

I think the term of art is "unlocking value".

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?

On one hand, it's a crappy business model, but on the other hand, is it really?

Vendor lock-in sucks, but people have been warning about it forever.

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).

It’s called Private Equity and it’s hugely popular.

The trend in recent years is buying up software in verticals, gluing it together and flipping it to the next flipper.

Symantec plays this game now, and it looks like PE money likes it, too, so I expect more of this, and what results from it.

(See also: SolarWinds)

> 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.

Didn't you heard about vmware and Brocade recently?

That name brings back memories! Not of the good kind.

I got one of these notices. The first notice was Friday the 16th saying that my free account was being upgraded. Tried to login into my account and got a 500 error.

Then Sunday the 18th, I got a notice that my account was being charged for a 5 user license.

I had stopped using Fogbugz in 2015 when they sunset or went pay only for Kiln (I forget which happened); so I was a bit surprised.

I couldn't login to my account. But I created a support ticket (had to jump through a few hoops since I had a Fogbugz support account already that wouldn't work).

Support answered the ticket and assured me that my account was deleted and I will not be charged.

I've set a reminder to check my business credit card over the next little while... not that I'm suspicious or anything.

They're not only sending these to active (even if free) users:

They've sent payment demands to users who haven't used it but still had long idle free or expired accounts... but they _also_ deleted accounts that had been idle and have no error handling for that, so all the links in the email just give you 500 errors. Classy.

Yep, that's what happened with me.

> Does Joel Spolsky know? I don’t think he’d be impressed.

It doesn’t matter if he would be impressed. He sold the business, cash in hand, emotions have no place here.

I’m thinking about something else: if this company was the best buyer, what was the state of that business?

The business was fine. The new CEO was trash.

Okay, what was the state of the business under the new ceo at the time when the business was sold to the current owner?

Languishing, since all resources were being pushed into Glitch. Which then failed.

Thanks, that’s insightful.

It’s also inaccurate, but judging by the rest of his comments here, I’m not sure accuracy is the goal.

It is not inaccurate in the slightest. I'd love to hear exactly what you think is incorrect about it, but I'm well aware you avoid specificity as much as possible.

I believe Fog Creek sold it to someone else. I'm not sure how many times it has changed hands before it ended up where it is.

I also got this email and it has to have been at least a decade since I last used FogBugz. Any payment method I had on my account would have long since expired so I wasn't worried about actually being billed. Yet I still tried to find a place to login, maybe get a little nostalgia from whatever issues I last logged in the system, and likely begin the process of getting my account officially deleted. However there doesn't appear to actually be any way to login to FogBugz. I don't understand what this company is trying to do. Why send out "you owe us money" emails without having a website that at least functions enough for people to pay you? What is their goal here? Even if this is a scam, it doesn't seem to be a functioning one.

Is this not a massively fraudulent? "We've decided to bill your free account for past usage because we now own the company" does not compute - they did not pay for or maintain those free accounts, but are seeking backdated rent for them.

I guess this is one of the risks if you sell your company or software. I'm pretty sure Joel doesn't like this, but this will not reflect well on him - and yes, I know he sold the company some time ago, but how many people are going to check that instead of simply making a mental note about him being shady?

I got the same email and I sent them the same email. Not paying for anything, it was a free tool for a while, I didn’t use it, but loved the company. It is sad to see it crash and burn like this.

The article mentions moving on to Stack overflow, but Spolsky sold that last year also.

I think glitch is the current incarnation of what has the most claim to having once been Fog Creek. (though afaik Spolsky has minimal if any involvement with it anymore.)

Glitch failed into an acquihire by Fastly.