[Rexxar]

If I had created such a company and I couldn't work on it any more, I would prefer to close it completely than to sell it to crooks like that.

[heartbreak]

And in that way, it does reflect poorly on Joel and the Fog Creek folks.

[jobman]

I'm a former FC employee who was around when the acquisition went down. It was definitely a drama at the time. One could possibly even say a debacle. But to be fair to Joel, he had long moved on from the company and was focused on Stack Overflow. The new (at the time) CEO of the company is a merciless, self-absorbed jerk who couldn't care less about the product, its customers, or the employees who got sold along with the product.

[alex_sf]

The short version is: Joel didn't care. Fog Creek employees were opposed. Trash new CEO pushed it forward.