for using someone else's software on someone else's computers.

Run, Forest, run!

I would totally migrate away. Now.

And spread the word about how slack screws over clubs.

"And spread the word about how slack screws over clubs."

Please note that these "Slack" fuckwits have absolutely nothing to do with Slackware , the oldest continuously maintained (and some say the best) Linux distribution.

having been arguing against cloud for years, stories like this just justify my stance. With costs & the randomness of charging VMware & Nutanix pricing looks better and better, especially when you get to keep your data where you want it AND you know you won't get this craziness

$50K, payable in a week, apparently without warning makes Slack seem closer to a ransomware group than a legal corporation.

closer to a ransomware group than a legal corporation.

What difference did you think existed?

When I first read the headline, I assumed that I'd misread "Slack" and this was just(!) going to be a story about another ransomware group with a name I didn't recognise threatening a non-profit: was expecting to read that they'd slipped a virus onto a PC.

Nope, the virus was SaaS.

.. have cut them some, er, slack.

Astonishingly bad PR move, but this is what happens when money comes first and customer needs last.

Now for the fun part: not only did this produce bad PR, it also advertised the competition Mattermost alongside. Oops..

And the only way to get around this predatory behaviour was to raise a public stink. The only reason Slack did anything to make amendments was that this became public and they did not like the publicity. Imagine a nonprofit that does not have this social media reach.

Run your own machines, get a colocation somewhere or a cheap server from dunno, strato, and another from whoever so you have two plus local backup. Those are not too expensive, last time I checked, though I don't know about their actual requirements.

> Run your own machines, get a colocation somewhere or a cheap server from dunno, strato, and another from whoever so you have two plus local backup.

Good advice - if you have the know how to do so.

Size, build and maintain hardware (or use a hosted bare-bone VM), maintain OS, setup and maintain applications needed to build the functionalitity, build redundnancy/clustering as needed, do backups, test restores, resize/upgrade as needed for the business. Tune and optimize, provide call-out 24x7 as needed, ...

This can become a pretty expensive piece of labor, if you are not a hacking club and cannot do it inhouse.

And many of the non-profits or small for-profits using SaaS as the go-to choice never had the know how to begin with.

For us geeks, this is all bread and butter stuff. But for most people it's not: It's totally outside of their domain experience. That's why they pay someone to do it for them. (It's why I take my car to a garage to be serviced)

I'm perfectly capable of running my own email system (SMTP, IMAP, web mail, anti-spam, etc) - and I did for about a decade. Eventually I got fed up of the grind of it and I now pay Fastmail for mail.

All of my email traffic is archived and backed up locally and that includes a number of long running support lists. I have been asked on a number of occasions either why do I keep 25+ year old traffic or why don't I just leave it on the server, but I don't have to worry about either the volume of stored messages or 'exceeding my quota', and I can go back through the history of a development at leisure. If that history was duplicated across many other users then it would remain available and THAT is what cloud computing should be about? Independent duplication not tied to one particular monopoly and protected from this sort of harassment.

That many key elements of the development scene have been hijacked by corporate greed just makes a transparent shared network even more essential. No reliance on the likes of github's central strangle hold, or any of the other single supplier systems?

The slack messaging system is owned by Salesforce which might appear to be doing a Broadcom (get rid of low revenue customers).

This saga has similarities with the Oracle raid on Java licence fees for universities here in the UK: both want to charge per seat for a large number of people who are not employees , volunteers and participants in the case of Hack Club and non-tech students in the case of the universities.

Lessons will not be lost on the young people I think.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/20/uk_colleges_45m_saving_deal/

"Lessons will not be lost on the young people I think."

Just what I was thinking. Lessons learned when young should help them in their careers. Who knows, some of them may be making purchasing decisions in the future.

Are now using Slack over their Chime software internally. I wonder how THAT will end?

...must be in real trouble to push that hard for so little (relative to their possible revenue elsewhere) from a tiny organisation.

Placing a tiny non-profit in your crosshairs to squeeze reeks of desperation.

The prelude to AI, which, as it stands, is an even worse idea.

Tech corporations do not provide services. They farm you for profit.