It's like a protection racket. You need that software, possibly have no good alternatives, and CA knew that. They rarely seemed to put much effort into maintaining anything either.
I am surprised it's not a more popular business model now.
Same strategy - the pricing is insanely high (for a library), and the project is effectively dead now, but it’ll take some larger enterprises awhile to move away from.
I find it especially sleazy due to the nature of transitive dependencies in open source. For example, somebody creates a popular open source lib out of their own sense of good will, let’s call it “Foo lib.” It depends on Akka, all is fine for years, then all of the sudden Typelevel (Akka maintainers) say “physche, Akka is proprietary now, Foo lib users now owe us $$$.” Gross.
You still have a right to use the old version forever for free. And that's what any business in this position should do - just make a 'maintenance only' fork.
In the 1980's, when you weren't worrying about the someone accidentally starting WWIII, Japan completely unraveling the American Industrial Complex, Dungeons and Dragons turning your kids into satanists, marijuana turning your kids into crackheads (1980's meth epidemic) or treating your child's ADHD not being a sign of responsibility but declaring moral bankruptcy on your terrible parenting skills, you had to worry about your company's hard assets being worth more than your market cap, and a bunch of people staging a hostile takeover so they could sell your company for scrap to release that 'value' that is really your rainy day fund.
See also "Other People's Money" starring Danny DeVito as a corporate raider/Pinocchio character.
Vendor lock-in sucks, but people have been warning about it forever.
Pissing off your customers isn't good business if you want to keep them long term or maintain a reputation (in order to gain new customers or expand into different business-lines).
The trend in recent years is buying up software in verticals, gluing it together and flipping it to the next flipper.
(See also: SolarWinds)
I mean, it's pretty popular? Basically what happened to Travis CI, right?
There's a spectrum of how bad it can be (how much they raise prices, how far maintenance/support drops), but it's kind of what "equity partners" generally do with purchased software companies.