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"