Wildbit has sold the family business work-for-other-reasons-than-monetary-renumeration trope for a couple of decades. They've had some great products like Beanstalk and Deploybot and some total follies like Converyor.

Employees had no ownership, products were often sold or put up for sale, and my understand is that compensation was middle of the road at best. It was 37Signals-lite.

They seem like good people, but if you sell your employees and customers on a moralized construction then you do have a moral obligation. The great irony is that there is no good way for something like this to end unless the owners are ready to hand off their business to new leadership on terms that set it up to remain independent. A power of the capital class is that it eats succession for lunch.

I wonder why there was no employee buyout. I suspect it wasn't the most attractive offer from the perspective of the current owners.