I'm not sure this is appealing to wallstreet at all but this just describes the appeal of open source as a customer to me. VMware is a just perfect case example, they're literally firing paying customers and destroying a product lots of people are using to make a quick buck. The company and the product will ultimately be destroyed regardless of their underlying value but not before they make bank.

But if Vmware was open source they never would have bought it. The leverage being closed provides is the whole point.

This is how Silicon Valley works in a nutshell.

There is legacy technology corporation A - with a bunch of enterprise customers, eventually they: - reach a plateau of sales /growth - feature development slows down - cost getting cut across the board

The core product team eventually just leaves the company to use all their internal knowledge to create a startup B that competes with A and delivers next-gen technology in the same space. They get traction, and funding and outgrow company A eventually.

The fallacy here is that you’re ignoring the pipeline. The next generation of infrastructure admins are either running on all cloud, or running on something they can easily access like any KVM based system (like proxmox). VMware is instantly a legacy system because anyone who doesn’t already run it isn’t going to bother learning it.

Revenue generating or not, the free platforms are will generate more revenue than VMware at such and exorbitant cost.

"Can afford" and "expensive" are distractions - orgs don't buy things just because they have the money to so they find the most expensive option to burn it on. The product has to justify the cost vs other options, not just be feasible to purchase.

Check out xen