There has been an acquisition in the dev-tooling world this month, the sort where a larger company swallows a smaller one whose product sits quietly in a lot of people's pipelines, mine included. The announcement said all the usual reassuring things about the team being excited and nothing changing for existing users. I have read that paragraph enough times now to know it is true right up until the day it isn't.
It is not that acquisitions are inherently bad. Sometimes they are the only way a small but essential tool gets the resources to keep going. But the moment a thing I depend on becomes a line item in someone else's strategy, the incentives shift. The roadmap that mattered to me starts answering to a roadmap that doesn't. The free tier I quietly built three jobs on top of becomes a question rather than a given.
So I did what I always do when this happens, which is take stock. Where exactly do I depend on this thing, and how painful would leaving be? Is there an open format underneath it or am I locked to their flavour of it? Could I self-host the last open release if the hosted version went somewhere I didn't want to follow?
None of that is panic, just hygiene. The healthiest position to be in when your tool gets bought is to genuinely not mind, because you could walk if you had to. I am mostly in that position with this one, and the small list of places where I'm not is now my list of things to fix. I hope they prove me wrong and it stays good. I am keeping my exits mapped anyway.