Bought out by Broadcom, who realized if you increase prices by 10x and lose 75% of customers, you end with more revenue and less support costs

Hock Tan's only goal is to increase stock value. Period. At the expense of anything and everything else, stock value.

That's how he gets paid - increasing short term stock price.

"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the results" - Charlie Munger

That is absolutely not what fiduciary duty means, unless you missed scare quotes and a /s.

Broadcom competing with Oracle for most hated company prize:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1jfumvw/broadcom_...

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/22/euro_cloud_body_ecco_...

Maybe Oracle can buy Broadcom and settle it

Bought by Broadcom, now implementing classic strategy of leveraging vendor lock-in to milk customers.

The increase is massive ( I’ve heard x5 over existing contracts in some places )

Ah, 5x? At $WORK, the low code tool vendor that is used to build the monolith (and that of our sister company) is bought by a private equity firm. Our sister company will face a 7x increase. Another fun thing is that the license is based on a percentage of licensing cost to their customers.

Their game is clearly to squeeze very hard for a few years, and then deprecate the product. I can't imagine that there are companies that are fine with such price hikes.

Not only that, add dip downs in quality. For instance, VMware was famous for stuter-less graphics, now it's a 15 FPS show.

Milking customers is already a thin ice but in combination with declining quality it's a death sentence.

Fork?

Are you under the impression that VMware is free open source software?

Yes, I was, actually.

fair enough, you're one of today's (un)lucky 10,000! (https://xkcd.com/1053/)

VMWare has always been proprietary, there's been some handwringing a few times about the fact that they borrow from FOSS quite a bit.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-developer-abandons-vmwar...

Broadcom bought VMware and changed the pricing.

Imagine seeing a 300% or more cost increase for no particular reason.

the reason is greed, old as time