(Credit: @KingLancelot, who's link is somehow dead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198414)
This isn't a ground zero thing. There's probably 1,000 companies that use VMWare like capabilities, and you simply need to fund a group to bring FOSS to the level of VMWare.
Broadcom doing the acquisition gives you a bit of runway. You probably have a year or two before things get really bad. There's probably going to be VMWare engineers that hate the acquisition and will run to a foundation to make a competing/better FOSS equivalent. VirtualBox is a toy and owned by oracle. Well, it's open source too, right? Get something up that is Oracle-free and up to snuff.
Corporations are so stupid at IT. It really shows that basic IT management is an afterthought in B-School, when it is arguably more important than accounting and finance tricks in the long run.
At least the CEOs bragging about not even reading email have been dinosaured.
Any takers?
VMWare has many different products, most of them very good but they don't have massive uptake.
When VMWare gets a new customer they might buy a handful of VMWares products, but not 50+.
So Broadcom has said, lets stop selling them individually, you can only buy big bundles on a subscription basis.
Broadcom bought Symantec a few years back and our Symantec Endpoint Security licenses expired - we ended up moving to another solution because we couldn't get ahold of anybody from Symantec to renew our license even after contacting them a month in advance - even our distributor couldn't get in touch with anyone from Symantec.
Broadcom sucks companies up and wrings every possible profit avenue dry and moves on to the next.
You purchase a licence on subscription but you have to host the software yourself, vmware won't host it for you anymore.