How is this disturbing? People moving away from Windows must make everyone happy in my book. Probably just leverage in contract negotiations with VMWare as other comments have pointed out though.
It's a different market segment for sure, but at my company we spent considerable engineering resources migrating the codebase away from a proprietary embedded toolchain to gcc. The toolchain vendor's licensing scheme was expensive and annoying, and had no chance of sustainably scaling with the company's growth. They weren't willing to negotiate, and so they priced themselves out of relevance permanently. Maybe they thought we were bluffing?
It’s the sysadmins sub - ie the crowd dealing with the fallout when migrations go bad. So sudden big moves of questionable technical merit are disturbing to them
Sure, but if you have ever administered Windows vs Linux servers, you’ll know which is much more pleasant to work with. Being on the hoo for the migration though …