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

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

thunderbong

37 points

3 comments

fastcode.ioNewsstory

controversialnegative

Debate

60/100

VmwareOpen SourceAcquisitionsDebt

Key topics

Vmware

Open Source

Acquisitions

Debt

Discussion Activity

Light discussion

First comment

12h

Peak period

10-12h

Avg / period

Key moments

01Story posted
Aug 29, 2025 at 11:04 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Aug 30, 2025 at 10:42 AM EDT
12h after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
1 comments in 10-12h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Aug 30, 2025 at 4:18 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (3 comments)

Showing 3 comments

nailer

4 months ago

1 reply

> “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..

Arrowmaster

4 months ago

> After 18 years of providing free, production-ready container images to millions of developers worldwide, Bitnami was effectively ending its free tier.

There are some seriously questionable statements being made early in this article.

davecb

4 months ago

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.

View full discussion on Hacker News

ID: 45071581Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 7:45:36 PM

Want the full context?

Jump to the original sources

Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.

Open link View on HN