Rug pulls, forks, and open-source feudalism

This is causing management at the current company to run in circles a bit as well. The company has been fairly adamant about having support contracts for systems, and it has encountered a number of these stunts. Opscode with chef a long time ago, CentOS exit, VMWare, Broadcom has a number of more ugly things available in Tanzu.

And we were either paying these companies (looking at VMWare), or looked for quotes and intending to pay these companies. But suddenly, your configuration management is supposed to cost almost 6 digits per year. Very basic services should suddenly cost a mid-6-digit range per year for a basic suport contract. Sorry but what the fuck? And - again, looking at VMWare - even then we can't really rely on it?

I've been recommending to instead sponsor foundations, or straight up paying maintainers and developers of OSS we use regularly. The giggles when suggesting that have been getting quieter. But I'd rather hire a Proxmox/qemu dev than start paying the next VMWare.

Isn't it paradoxal, that those mentioned companies had set up an OSPO (to do OSS the right/community way... with the right/community minded people)

I believe this kind of schizophrenia is the price to pay of (too) big organizations.

You have the right idea; audit all the software you run, including dependencies, and make sure that they are all viable, by contributing back with dev hours and funding, and advocate that other related companies do the same.