Broadcom's intent to buy VMware has been sitting in the back of my mind since it was announced earlier this summer, and not in a good way. I do not run a VMware shop at home, but plenty of the infrastructure I have touched over the years does, and the pattern when a tool you depend on gets acquired by a company with a reputation for ruthless margin optimisation is not a happy one.
The worry is rarely the product breaking on day one. It is the slow stuff: licensing terms that get less friendly at renewal, the smaller customers gently encouraged to leave, the parts of the roadmap that do not generate enough revenue quietly going dormant. You do not lose the tool. You lose the version of it you signed up for.
I have lived through enough of these to have a reflex now. When something I rely on gets bought, I do not panic, but I do start reading the exits. What would it cost to move? Is there an open equivalent that is merely less convenient rather than genuinely worse? The answer is usually "more painful than I would like, less painful than being trapped". The acquisition has not changed anything I run yet. It has just reminded me, again, that depending on a tool is also depending on whoever happens to own it this year.