On Fri, 19 Aug 2022, George Dunlap wrote:Hey all,
I received a request for an interview regarding Xen’s take on the Broadcom VMWare acquisition. I’ve done some “prep work”, saying what my *real* opinions are, and then what I might want to say to her in the interview; you can find her initial query and my thoughts here:
https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/4MZyoCT8s--az3Koo5QBPCOI3QHAGIKEceXQosly43I/
I accepted the interview in particular in the hopes that I could put that sound byte in there about open source meaning that if one company abandons a large tranche of customers, another company can sweep in and cover them.
The interview is Monday evening, 9pm BST. I’d appreciate any feedback — particularly anything you think I shouldn’t say; but anything you think I should add as well.
I would not say "they're purposely stepping back from the vast majorityof the market". The quote claims that VMWare will "focus on the 600largest software customers". It is not the same thing.
Hey Stefano,
Thanks for the feedback. I was trying to make that distinction, but apparently I didn’t do very well. :-) When I said “stepping back from the vast majority of the market”, I meant that they were going to stop trying to *acquire* customers in those market segments, reducing the competition for other companies to acquire those customers. When speaking of existing customers, I did say “a company that is no longer prioritizing them”.
The main reason I took the interview was to emphasize the fact that in open-source, customers are in a much better position: if there’s a market, *some* company will come and fill it; and in any case companies themselves can take the software and maintain or improve it.
The point about Xen Project being a consortium is also good; that’s an even better situation than being a customer of an open-source project with only a single contributor, because there are already companies with expertise in the area.
Let me try to reword it so that it’s speaking in generalities, without making any predictions about what Broadcom will do.
