I would have thought a general mailout to all registered members advising of this sale would have been the least that the owners of the software could have done. Like others I had no idea it was coming out, as I work on my own site fully just myself, and have a family, one daughter doing her Higher School certificate (Leaving school life), her formal etc, then my time was determine by that, not by the release of a beta version.
Charging others for a Beta release, just smacks of the same thing that Vbulletin did with version 4 and that left a sour taste in many site owners mouths when that happened, all I see is similar happening here making a grab for money. You could just have released a Beta Version with a time limit built into it that turn it off after a certain period of time, as it can't be used for production sites, then generally it is only there for testing and passing on bug reports from a community based environment. No wonder there is litigation going, it smacks of VB all over again. As people who are connected with this software worked for VB in the past, then there is propriatory information that they would be privy too, that they might have used in creating this software, again no wonder there is litigation going on.
I don't think anyone has learned from the past with VB, just doing the same thing again.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Peter