If they were tied to a hardware product I understand the enshittificatiom argument but you can literally just switch to another provider. Sure the process isn’t nice, but you’re not that locked in. There are viable alternatives, and the market is, or at least seems healthy and competitive.
I don’t really understand though.
Broadcom doesn’t really do software outside of their hardware enablement, so they’re not buying up anything resembling competition.
Virtualization is also a rather competitive market, with plenty of smaller players like proxmox and xcp-ng
The way I see it they’re moving away from b2c and squeezing the shit out of Oracle and other large locked in businesses.
If you’re a smaller business, your sysadmin gets a pay raise from the difference saved in licensing because they have slightly less features and automation.
Who exactly outside said smaller businesses is suffering here?
Diversification is key, I believe you want to avoid being beholden to a single last outlet. Get ya righty news from Reddit, the lefty from lemmy, balk at how they are both ridiculous, and probably find some of the established publications and either budget a subscription or pass everything though an archival service to bypass the paywall.
A little bit of everything is key
Afaik no. Some games will run with steam open in offline mode without an internet connection but that’s about it.