Why is a buyout like this reason for celebration and congratulations? I understand that the developers received money; but now they no longer own their IP, and can no longer decide the future path for their software.
I say this as someone who was contacted by a VC firm recently. They were interested in investing, but their assumption was that we wanted to grow and "exit". When I asked for clarification on what "exit" meant, I was told that it means to sell the company. I was confused as to why someone would want to sell something they spent so many years creating.
(That said, I think in this case their tech will genuinely improve Apple's software. And maybe they get to continue doing passionate work at Apple. It just feels like they are no longer in control.)
I guess so, it's just that his direction under Apple will not be his own. Perhaps he will be allowed to work on whatever he wants, even if it's risky or experimental?
If that was part of the nature of the deal, then I could see it being quite attractive.
It might be a bad assumption on my part. I have no idea what it's like to work at Apple. Perhaps all employees are allowed to work on whatever they want, and pursue their personal passions.
No doubt Apple put a very lucrative offer on the table, but another route could have been for the author to dual-license the code - GPL it so the community benefits, while any improvements he can then push out in his app which he continues to sell.
My guess is that Apple values his underlying algorithm implementation, not his app. The implementation seems highly architecture specific and tuned for certain ARM processors.
It seems like Apple might replace their iOS JPEG implementation with his, and all developers on iOS will benefit from the very fast image encoding routines.
I say this as someone who was contacted by a VC firm recently. They were interested in investing, but their assumption was that we wanted to grow and "exit". When I asked for clarification on what "exit" meant, I was told that it means to sell the company. I was confused as to why someone would want to sell something they spent so many years creating.
(That said, I think in this case their tech will genuinely improve Apple's software. And maybe they get to continue doing passionate work at Apple. It just feels like they are no longer in control.)