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1502 points JustSkyfall | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.529s | source
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casq ◴[] No.45285280[source]
Hi, I’m Christina, cofounder of Hack Club. We just announced this news to our community, and this post is from one of the teenagers in Hack Club. It’s an accurate description of what’s happened, and we’re grateful to them for posting. Slack changed the terms of a special deal we were given last year to charge us for staff and volunteers (not for every teenager coding), and we built programs around that special rate. Then this spring they changed the terms to every single user without telling us or sending a new contract, and then ignored our outreach and delayed us and told us to ignore the bill and not to pay as late as Aug 29

Then, suddenly, they called us 2 days ago and said they are going to de-activate the Hack Club Slack, including all message history from 11 years, unless we pay them $50,000 USD this week and $200,000 USD/year moving forward (plus additional annual fees for new accounts, including inactive ones)

For anyone reading this, we would really appreciate any way to contact people at Salesforce to discuss time to migrate because deactivating us in 5 days destroys all the work of thousands of teen coders at Hack Club and alum unnecessarily. We are not asking for anything for free. This was an underhanded process by the sales team to raise our rate exorbitantly from a qualified educational 501(c)(3) charity serving young developers or destroy all their projects, DMs and work forever. If Salesforce’s goals have changed- ok. Give us a reasonable amount of time to migrate- and don’t club us over the head like this. We have had an 11 year great relationship with Slack- and have introduced the company to many many future engineers and founders. My email if you can help us: christina@hackclub.com

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lelanthran[dead post] ◴[] No.45287482[source]
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1. cmsj ◴[] No.45287557[source]
Thank goodness you took the time to let us all know this....
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2. lelanthran ◴[] No.45288184[source]
> Thank goodness you took the time to let us all know this....

Be honest; how many times have we seen this? company, org or person flat out rejects an open source solution (which, most importantly, would actually work for them!), gets charity from the proprietary supplier and then complains when that charity comes to an end?

How many more times must we see it?

When working FOSS applications are rejected in favour of a proprietary product, well, there should be some pain for that decision.

If, as a technical decision maker (manager, founder, whatever), you make an unusually poor decision, you should get blowback for it.

For a long time there was literally no need for any decision maker to go with a proprietary chat solution. Anyone deciding to go with Slack, from this point onwards at any rate, deserve all the scorn they get.