I'm not going to try to answer for Rick but I am going to answer from the point of view of a long-time user of WWWThreads and from the point of view of someone whose contributions have been included in the official version.
If you are woried about the annual renewal costs, renew for 10 years now before Infopop take over. I'm sure that in 10 years there will be a better solution so you'll be safe until then.
If WWWThreads becomes heavilly pirated then does that affect you beyond the fact that you have paid for your original version and any upgrades? Are you loosing money?
Have you considered the fact that maybe Rick gets very little income from this software. Do you know how many registered users there are? Do you know how many people renew their licenses each year? Perhaps the choice was between doing a deal or simply packing this in. Would that have been better?
In all honesty, if Rick said, "Fine, I'll make you all happy and not do the deal with Infopop. Oh yes, instead I'm going to stop developing WWWThreads. Bye.", I wouldn't blame him. You own your copy of WWWThreads. You can use your existing version, and any upgraded version obtained whilst you still have a license to download it for as long as you want. UBB users cannot. New WWWThreads users may not be able to. You can. Think about that and be thankful that, whatever might happen on Thursday, you can still use your existing version and hack it to your heart's content. Be thankful that Rick and WWWThreads are not simply disappearing.
