"They are now contemplating a few purchase offers. I have no control or say over this process. There’s a lot of politics. I’m a builder, not a politician and I see no point in staying on."
The investors poured ~$15m into this company, and the board is now trying to fulfill its fiduciary duty by trying to recoup some of the invested capital. I understand that open-sourcing the code base would be a better outcome for its customers. However, I am having a tough time seeing if the investors were truly political or antagonistic in any way.
A bit of a tangent, but board members (and company officers) do not in general have a specific duty to maximize shareholder profit. They have a duty of care (think carefully about decisions) and a duty of loyalty (act in the best interests of the company as a whole). Those could lead reasonably to a profit-maximizing decision but it isn't a straight line.
Author goes on to talk about how difficult it was to raise capital, and the company being constantly undervalued. Doubtful they're only referring to this singular event.
Open sourcing their code would be a terrible idea for the business unless they opted for a Elastic/MongoDB style license where you are prohibited from offering a cloud version of the code.
Because you know AWS would be circling this news very closely for another product to add to their lineup.
The investors poured ~$15m into this company, and the board is now trying to fulfill its fiduciary duty by trying to recoup some of the invested capital. I understand that open-sourcing the code base would be a better outcome for its customers. However, I am having a tough time seeing if the investors were truly political or antagonistic in any way.