How VMware's Debt-Fueled Acquisition Is Killing Open Source

It's certainly killing companies, and multiple products that are open source. However, the community has the experience and knowledge to push back. Consider the Hashicorp license change in Terraform. A small community of businesses users forked it to create OpenTofu.

When an open source project starts to fail, it gets forked. If few use it, the new team will be small and mostly hobbyists. If multiple large companies are using the project, the new team will be larger, with more resources to help their sponsors and everyone else to move.

Broadcom is a rentier. That works if the program is closed-source. Less so with the Bitnami source code which is open-source and on GitHub.

> “This is the npm left-pad incident but worse,” one developer wrote on Hacker News. “At least that was an accident. This is intentional.”

The left pad incident was not an accident. It was a revenge attack for the name ‘Kik’ being given to the Messenger program rather than the existing open source package..