Discussion

jeffcox: I don't think we really need those quotes. Broadcom bought an existing, successful company, and immediately skyrocketed the price of their most used commercial offering.You don't need a degree in business to surmise that short term profits will also skyrocket but you will eventually lose the market.

fxtentacle: I stopped using VMware because they stopped supporting newer Linux kernels.Lack of maintenance => lack of users.

colechristensen: Private equity... or Broadcom... bleed dying things dry. It's arbitrage on companies that are too slow to adopt new technology. Instead of watching something die slowly squeeze it for everything it's got by making the inflexible companies pay for their inability to change.The end of a dead product is the same, but the financial reaper is betting they can make more money killing something quickly.

stuaxo: Should be a rule that when this happens and these companies fold that everything is open sourced - at least we'd all get something out of it.

steveBK123: The biggest blocker there is probably whatever remaining creditors to the company when it goes under then have claims on remaining assets like the software.One solution would be putting something in the tax code such that donating the code to an open source foundation gives a bigger benefit than simply writing it off as a total loss and destroying it.