Gaming

You think they might have had a reason to do that, something that had to do with them completely stiffing them out in the agreement? You're acting like they were being unreasonable but this is just a continuation of the white man's treaty, a tactic where you take a minority of a community, whoever's the cheapest and buy them out, and then have them represent the entire community. That's exactly what they did and if it wasn't for the fact that they had a controlling stake in the project they would have gotten away with it too. Is it at all surprising that one of the developers who 'played ball' in the scheme ended up becoming the CEO?

As with all things, if you zoom out and squint you can see the reality of the situation; and what you see is a capitalist organization shutting down a project that wasn't even competing with them or even a threat because they weren't under their absolute control. All capitalists do this, and it's the biggest reason why capitalism is such a dysfunctional and shitty system where inferior products end up as monopolies, by simple dint of hunting down and killing or assimilating anything better than them.