Back in the Ye Olden Times, we just paid a "license fee" and perhaps even a "maintenance fee" or a "support fee" for software we found valuable and useful, and if enough companies saw value in it, the company survived and even thrived, and if that wasn't the case, the company went under and we used a different product or we went without.

Now, we have just had about a 25 year run, where companies could live off of investor money for years until an IPO or buyout occurred, and these companies could grow with no regards for profit, and it's created a really bad set of mechanisms where end users are used to paying $0, or close to it (unless they are basically paying the vendor's AWS bill + a little profit to host it) unless it's too complex to go without a support contract and they are too small to figure out how to support it on their own (basically, Red Hat).

The drying up of free & easy investor money is going to leave a LOT of these companies very exposed.

What I don't understand is why IBM would buy it at all, I just don't see the win here for them, unless they are tyring to slowly corner the market on basic infrastructure stuff.

J.Ja