I don't think we really need those quotes. Broadcom bought an existing, successful company, and immediately skyrocketed the price of their most used commercial offering.

You don't need a degree in business to surmise that short term profits will also skyrocket but you will eventually lose the market.

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jandrese an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The term of art is Profit Taking. When you cash out your reputation to make a big quarterly profit. Did they also slash the research and development teams? Classic VC behavior.

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dogleash 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yup, or that bad view of Broadcom is because of the price hikes.

I had a meeting with IT where I was worried they were finally coming after my proxmox box they "didn't know about". Turns out they saw their vmware bill and suddenly had questions.

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colechristensen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Private equity... or Broadcom... bleed dying things dry. It's arbitrage on companies that are too slow to adopt new technology. Instead of watching something die slowly squeeze it for everything it's got by making the inflexible companies pay for their inability to change.

The end of a dead product is the same, but the financial reaper is betting they can make more money killing something quickly.

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me_again 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Was VMWare dying prior to the acquisition? I don't really know the financials but that wasn't the impression I had.

	▲	hungryhobbit 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		No, but Broadcom didn't buy them to build a company over time. They have a long pattern of buying a tech company, jacking up the prices, and making enough money (before customers switch) to more than make up for the purchase price of the company, netting them a tidy profit. Plus, at the end what they're left with isn't completely value-less either. Everyone who followed Broadcom (and that included many VMWare employees) knew exactly what was coming the moment the acquisition was announced.
	▲	wolvoleo 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Dying no, but their business certainly had a downward trend on it since so much is moving to containers instead.
	▲	colechristensen 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		VMWare din't have a growth trajectory and didn't have a reasonable expectation of one. You don't make these kinds of sales when you're circling the drain, you do it when you can see that future coming for you.

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stuaxo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Should be a rule that when this happens and these companies fold that everything is open sourced - at least we'd all get something out of it.

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nradov 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Totally impossible. Closed source software often contains IP licensed from other entities. Just because a company folds doesn't mean they can violate licensing agreements.

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snackbroken 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Just because a company folds doesn't mean they can violate licensing agreements.

It does if that's the law. Every jurisdiction routinely overrules contracts as unenforceable on the basis of some overriding law, so it wouldn't even really be that unusual. Whether it's a good idea or not is another question and one that depends almost entirely on second, third and higher order effects.

There probably is a world where all software is libre software and we still see similar rates of development, but it's not at all clear how you could get there. Especially not if you cared about the damage caused by upending the business models of a significant fraction of the world economy.

	▲	nradov 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nah. No jurisdiction is going to violate the IP rights of a separate company just because one of their customers or partners is forced to liquidate.

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steveBK123 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The biggest blocker there is probably whatever remaining creditors to the company when it goes under then have claims on remaining assets like the software.

One solution would be putting something in the tax code such that donating the code to an open source foundation gives a bigger benefit than simply writing it off as a total loss and destroying it.