No surprise at all.  It is usually a year so that they are on tap to sort out any legacy stuff and make sure all the external connections are handed over.

There is normally a 1-5 year clause about not doing anything else in the same field. So that the outgoing team cant set up just down the road doing something competitive or go and work for a competitor.

So the Serif Directors are all gone.
It would be interesting to see how many of the senior managers are still there.

I agree, this good thing has come to an end, but I still have perpetual V2 licences.
The problem is then where to go next.  Before we were on Adobe.inDesign.

Didn't they do this to themselves by selling out/merging?

Serif Europe and Serif Group are still registered at Companies house with the same 4 (3 actual) directors.
Todd Carpenter - Secretary and Director
Duncan Clark - Director
Claire Watkins - Director

Serif Holdings has no officers

I suspect that they aren’t listed on a readily accessible single page online, but if you know their names you can look them up on LinkedIn easily enough.

If by ‘originator directors’ you mean those who were involved when the company was founded in 1987, Ashley Hewson wasn’t one of them. He started in telesales in the late ’90s and worked his way up from there.

Oof, good riddance!

I didn't make any predictions regarding management back when they sold off the company after saying, time and again, that they never would, stopped selling their wares and left a bunch of customers stranded (especially the ones who started their 15-day trials during a… 30-day drought, ffs lol), shut down the forums in favor of Discord (ugh) and made a 180° on subscriptions (yeaaaah…), but I can't say I'm surprised in the least. In hindsight, what a completely stupid but understandable turn of events, considering the company that bought them.

Aaaaanyway, now that this thing looks to be with another foot in the grave, anyone willing to go the F/OSS route, as I suggested before? With these guys just coasting, and Adobe just, well, coasting, maybe those at the fringes will have another shot.

Heck, people are so fed up with even Windows and Microsoft's adware crap these days, that jumping ship to Linux may become a sensible course of action for many prosumers, if not hardened professionals, at some not-so-distant point in the future. Even I was super fed up with Apple when I feverishly edited my farewell post for the last time, but the way Alan Dye was “sacked” (rumour has it that he new he was getting the boot, hence why he let himself get poached by Meta) and Tim Cook decided to step down in such short succession after the mess that was Tahoe and their first botched attempt at a Siri revamp gives me a bit more confidence in the future of macOS, at least for the time being.

In any case, when it comes to creative software, I'll be doing my part, at least the tiny bit I can do for now before I finish and turn in my PhD thesis. I just sent the people at Scribus a bug report regarding third-party font managers (it doesn't support those, because of course it doesn't; respecting system-wide font APIs and behaving in the same way as any other macOS app is too exotic of a thing for a cross-platform, Qt-based F/OSS app to do ), and up next will come a thorough rundown of variable OpenType font support across the industry on the relevant forum topics (they still don't support those because it's a nascent format and it's technically hard to export them to PDF, and they convinced themselves that it's not that big of a deal in the market, or whatever). It's sad, because in the 1.7.x branch preview it finally got a decent, dockable palette interface and is otherwise shaping up to be a decent QuarkXPress/InDesign/Affinity Studio/Publisher competitor.

As for Inkscape and GIMP, I'm not touching those with a ten-metre-pole. Yet. It's a bit ironic, considering how Scribus was always my favourite punching bag over at Serif's forums… and it turned out to be the most native-looking of the bunch, heh.