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2071 points JustSkyfall | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.034s | source | bottom
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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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actionfromafar ◴[] No.45287173[source]
Thousands of teen coders now hate Salesforce in advance. This is very shortsighted.
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1. xedrac ◴[] No.45288400[source]
Haven't you heard? Sales force doesn't hire programmers anymore. AI is all their CEO needs. ;p. Seriously though, this behavior reminds me of Oracle, and is a great reminder that proprietary software can very quickly become a big liability.
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2. pessimizer ◴[] No.45288656[source]
And that if you don't fight it when everybody is telling you to, you end up with Bari Weiss running CBS news.
3. boringg ◴[] No.45289174[source]
I mean the sales team is probably all AI at this point.
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4. whstl ◴[] No.45289221[source]
It is impossible to know these days. I just get flooded with automated messages in random channels by them wanting to chat with me about whatever place I'm a manager at.
5. nobleach ◴[] No.45289516[source]
Oracle is exactly who sprang to mind. Throughout my history as a software developer, even Microsoft has had a ton of interest in being involved in the community. Yes, they've wanted to extinguish much of it, when it didn't align with their financial goals... but they were always interested in being part of the "software development conversation". Oracle on the other hand has never extended an olive branch. They're quite happy existing on their own proprietary island. A great reminder that, "they don't want ot play in the pool with you, they want to own the whole pool and charge you to swim in it".
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6. burnte ◴[] No.45290281[source]
Marc Benioff is an acolyte of Ellison, he learned and uses the same tactics.