I don’t begrudge them their money. But I feel a lot more at ease depending on a company whose business model is I give them money and they give me stuff and that they are doing so profitably. That’s part of the reason that I’m a big fan of companies like Backblaze and JetBrains.
I worked as a dev lead for one company where we were our vendors largest customer (over 60% of their revenue). I recommended that we either don’t depend on that vendor for our new implementation when contract renewals came or that we insisted on them putting their code in escrow in case they were sold and they abandoned the software.
Yes it did. But the stated hopes of most of the posters on this submission seem to be that they will be a viable competitor to the big server chip manufacturers.