[cesarb]

> Pirates get a better product.

Your comment reminded me of this classic article: https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/

"If I choose open source, I don't have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing."

That is, it's not just pirates who get a better product; open source users get a better product too.

(Going back to the context of this thread: those who chose an open source alternative to the products in question have avoided all of this mess, even if they had to forsake some useful features for that.)

[denton-scratch]

> even if they had to forsake some useful features

Curious: what does VMWare do that you can't do using Xen, KVM etc? Why was VMWare worth a billion?

I used to use VMWare ages ago (free version). It had nice GUIs; ad-hoc VM setup and management was miles easier than Xen (my driver). But most VM setup isn't ad-hoc, and isn't done through a UI, it's done through automation.

Broadcom seems to be a mean, nasty company: "Everyone hates us, we don't care."

[chii]

So the issue of open source becomes : who creates the open source product in the first place?

The fact that open source exists today is because there are charitable people out there that are contributing it for free (or effectively free). Some business models employ open source as a marketing strategy for their paid parts, which is inevitably what you really would need (and thus have the "licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing" problem).

In the end, the pirate's product is free because they can make it free for way less effort, at the cost of the original creator of that software. While it's arguable that the piratee does not really do harm, as they wouldn't have paid for said software anyway, it is the original creator of the software that borne the cost of its creation.

[rlpb]

For this reason open source always lags, but this decade's proprietary cutting edge always* becomes the next decade's open source.

* except in niches