[LAU] Some disturbing news

[David Kastrup]

Louigi Verona <louigi.verona at gmail.com> writes:

> It is rare that an acquisition by a larger company doesn't screw a smaller
> one. And this happens not because the parent company has a goal of
> destroying what they buy, but because merging two different companies is
> really hard, from basically any point of view.
>
> I have worked in at least two companies right after their acquisition by a
> larger company, and have witnessed all the growing pains. One company of
> the two did not survive. And nobody in the parent company wanted them to
> fail, quite the contrary.

Well, one example in the music business is the notation program Sibelius
letting itself be acquired by Avid.  Then Avid got into liquidity
problems and decided to bleed Sibelius dry for what it's worth, firing
all of the British development team and bouncing "development" (more
reduced to interface and window dressing) around numerous countries
(I've not kept track).  The original founders (the Finn brothers) tried
buying their product back but were refused.  So they got their payout
but aren't allowed to work on their software anymore.

They'd probably have gotten less money if they had licensed their stuff
as Open Source but would not have needed to attempt to buy it back in
order to be able to continue working on it after getting laid off.

Moral?  This is proprietary software, there is no moral.

-- 
David Kastrup