These engineers will never otherwise work for VMware. So they spent a shitton of money to hire them. I wouldn't be surprised if it was just for the two engineers.
There are certainly more than just those two engineers that work at Heptio. Surely some of them will also continue the work that Heptio still has in front of it? I don't have any insider knowledge about this besides what was in the article, but it says that "Beda and McLuckie _and their team_" will all be joining VMware.
I have no reason to doubt any of that, although I don't know what it means for Heptio's Amazon partnership, or utilities like Heptio Authenticator. Presumably that work will still continue in some form though, it would be a surprise to hear otherwise since VMware and AWS are already "strategic technology partners" as well.
I knew a guy like that. He was big into open source and he worked for a small start up. His company was swallowed up by a huge tech company. Years later I tried to get him to join the company I worked for, and he said it was impossible, basically his stock options were so insane he couldn't work anywhere else. "Golden handcuffs"
