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My guess here: the product isn't valuable enough to sell off (see Horizon), the customers who buy the product aren't in their list of 600 accounts that they want to focus on, and the invoice price is a rounding error next to their enterprise offerings.

Broadcom is bloodthirsty and I'd suggest they're doing this out of the goodness of their hearts but there is little evidence that they have one.

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When they say "Free" what they mean is these products are now the walking dead. They are on maintenance only support until any existing commercial contracts expire at which point they will be cancelled.

In this case, I admit that I think it's the right thing to do. These products don't really need to exist as commercial offerings except for a few very niche cases.

It doesn't sound like they're trying to kill them, since they're moving commercial usage to a subscription license.

I'm not sure killing them actually makes a lot of sense - the products apparently share a lot of code with esxi, so it's two products for the R&D of one.

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