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Fogbugz fuckz its userbase by blackwater 09/17/2022, 12:24pm PDT
Time to monetize, baby!

josephruscio wrote:

@FogBugzTeam: sending me an email today that you are auto-upgrading and intend to start charging me tomorrow for a free account I haven't logged into for (checks notes) ... 13 YEARS is a bold move.

@IgniteTech @FogBugzTeam trying to delete this free account I forgot about over a decade ago, your reset password functionality isn't working or at best miserably delayed. Probably overloaded with 100K+ other people like me suitably annoyed on a Friday.


For those who don't know: Fogbugz was kind of a JIRA competitor written in the early 2000s by this NYC hipster named Joel Spolsky. Or at least, he owned the company that wrote it. Joel liked to make blog posts about the software business and became kind of a minor celebrity in among the "hacker news crowd" (although I don't know if HN even existed back when Joel started out...)

Honestly, I always thought he was a bit overrated. His most famous blog post was the one from 2000 arguing that you should never rewrite your software. Basically, Joel was around at Netscape when Microsoft "cut off their air supply" by giving away a competing product for free. Netscape responded by starting a rewrite of their software which took years and did not save the company. From this, Joel concluded that rewrites are bad, rather than concluding that having a monopoly "competing" with you by giving away your product for free is bad.

Joel made a lot of blog posts about his life in NYC as a kind of small software business owner. They were all very happy and optimistic stuff. Most of them are from the early 2000s. He liked to talk about how he used shitty old Microsoft technologies, but people kept buying his shit. It was a very typical management perspective -- well, our shit still sells, so stop whining about code quality! But Joel was a good writer, whereas most management types were not. The main product he talked about was FogBugz.

Anyway. Apparently, at some point, Joel sold off FogBugz to IgniteTech. Whose tagline is "where software goes to live" (I am not making this up).

And now, the new owners are trying to charge everyone who ever used a demo of FogBugz. With a Friday night email informing them they have a bill waiting for them. :)
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Fogbugz fuckz its userbase by blackwater 09/17/2022, 12:24pm PDT NEW
    Correction: he wasn't at Netscape in 2000, but just criticizing them from afar NT by blackwater 09/17/2022, 12:40pm PDT NEW
    Aaand they apologized... suspiciously late. NT by blackwater 09/22/2022, 2:27pm PDT NEW
        We have all attempted to screw our users now and again. NT by Kirahu Nagasawa 09/22/2022, 9:15pm PDT NEW
            Just hoping you're not our resident school teacher over here NT by Fingers Crossed 09/22/2022, 9:57pm PDT NEW
    So did they end up losing their merchant account due to chargeback volume? NT by Entropy Stew 10/05/2022, 7:53pm PDT NEW
        I don't think anyone knows. by blackwater 10/06/2022, 4:33pm PDT NEW
    Re: Fogbugz fuckz its userbase by hi 09/18/2024, 8:14pm PDT NEW
 
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