I'm torn on this. On the one hand what Broadcom is doing is deplorable on the otherhand somebody making a "Watcha gonna do about it, you got nobody else to go to" offer to AT&T is one of the most ironic things ever.
Interesting that they would act this hostile towards ATT. AT&T would surely be a major potential customer for Broadcom's network chips (either directly or through someone like Arista that builds products with them).
The value of that business from an ISP has to be much much higher than a support contract for servers. Even if they don't use Broadcom for networking today, why put any more strategic business at risk over something like this?
Long term this is good for the software ecosystem as a whole. Especially open source options like proxmox. I think Broadcom is making a strategic business mistake not willing to negotiate in good faith. However this is the true cost of using closed source solutions. The more this happens the more it gets factored into business decisions.
This is what late-stage corporate software product strip-mining suicide by footgunning looks like. Broadcom has just made it all that much easier for a new entrant to displace and replace similar functionality with less onerous terms and more consistent pricing.
The typical Broadcom revenue extraction has struck again!
Just another example of a greedy company like Broadcom buying up companies, jacking up prices to extract profit, while the employees and VMWare clients suffer.
