I get that this business model is fashionable amongst wannabe rent-seekers, but it's still antisocial and should be shunned.
In this case, nobody forced (generic) you to use Bitnami's Docker images, you probably just thought "how convenient, always updated and easy to pull, one less thing to worry about". Which is fine, but it's always a bet on what will happen in the future.
Reasonable people can disagree about the degree to which vendor lock-in is antisocial or the degree to which there even is vendor lock-in here. But telling victims of such behavior to just suck it up and price it in only serves to distract from and abet actors abusing positions of power to rent seek and create low trust environments. It's not a systemic solution and it's not a serious engagement with the criticism levied.
Freedom of roaming without having to worry about pickpockets it's one thing. Deciding that you go with the opensource offering of a company because it's convenient for you is another. I know it's just one example but the entitlement here is _the key_. You are entitled to go to whatever zone of a city and it's not right to blame the victim in that case. You are not entitled to have part of the business decisions of a company you were a "client" without paying a dime or signing any binding contract. You would be entitled to that if they were breaking some opensource license, for example.
For me, the key is the bait and switch. It's like a drug dealer offering first time customers a discount. It's a good business strategy to get people hooked. Very enterprising. Nonetheless, I would prefer a society without such behaviour.
Sure, in this case the bridge is still there, and it started as a toll-bridge with free lanes. Now the free lanes are closing.
Crying orphans will be stranded on one side and their mothers bereaved on the other side, corporations will starve without new updates, millions of innocent businesses will wither away all because *they* closed the free lane without a consultation first, and with just one month notice. A total cybercide.
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OSI licenses should come with indicators to signal affiliations with a preferred theory of justice, so when the eventual grievance event triggers people will have the correct framing at hand.
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Anyway, as always, https://www.broadcom.com/company/corporate-responsibility is pretty clear on the matter!
Rent-seeking would be Broadcom saying that you must run a Bitnami image in CloudFoundry or pay a penalty for not doing so. They are in fact doing some work here. We may disagree on whether or not they're being compensated fairly for that work, but that disagreement doesn't turn this into "rent-seeking"
Maybe it's just me?
Note, the work gets done anyway. The highway is still there. (And marginal cost of more people using it is ... low.)
That said, it's a matter of definition. Usually rent-seeking refers to manipulating public rules, public spending, etc. Here that seems close to impossible. (Broadcom exploit their vendor lock-in business position as much as they want, it's a purely private arrangement, no one is and no one was forced to start using Broadcom's shit.)
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That said 2.0, rent in "rent-seeking" refers to a part of income (based on Adam Smith's division of income into profit, wage, and economic rent). Where economic rent is payment gained that's not justified by natural costs and market forces. (Of course, good luck coming up with a reliable model for this.) ...
However, here it seems we do know how to come up with the right numbers for profit and rent. Profit was what they were earning before and now ... any extra income is rent that they get by putting the gate down on the free lanes. (And, of course, as people will migrate away we'll see this rent decrease, likely substantially.)