[cthor]

Vendor lock-in is a thing. Switching costs are a thing. They know this. That's the whole business model. They're expecting that the cost of switching to outweigh the cost of the subscription.

I get that this business model is fashionable amongst wannabe rent-seekers, but it's still antisocial and should be shunned.

[darkwater]

Evaluating the risks of vendor lock-in is a buyer's task, unless it is a protected market or there is a monopoly abuse involved.

In this case, nobody forced (generic) you to use Bitnami's Docker images, you probably just thought "how convenient, always updated and easy to pull, one less thing to worry about". Which is fine, but it's always a bet on what will happen in the future.

[cthor]

Yes, yes. And a person who's pick-pocketed may well do better to protect their pockets. This does not absolve the thief.

Reasonable people can disagree about the degree to which vendor lock-in is antisocial or the degree to which there even is vendor lock-in here. But telling victims of such behavior to just suck it up and price it in only serves to distract from and abet actors abusing positions of power to rent seek and create low trust environments. It's not a systemic solution and it's not a serious engagement with the criticism levied.

[coredog64]

This is not rent-seeking: Rent-seeking is leveraging your position to garner economic rents, like putting a toll gate across a highway in which the only value received for the toll is the opening of the gate.

Rent-seeking would be Broadcom saying that you must run a Bitnami image in CloudFoundry or pay a penalty for not doing so. They are in fact doing some work here. We may disagree on whether or not they're being compensated fairly for that work, but that disagreement doesn't turn this into "rent-seeking"

[asmor]

The penalty is the work of migrating away and redoing any integration work on a month's notice. That might seem trivial to a small deployment, but I know some people that use these images everywhere, including in places that aren't immediately obvious.

[pas]

People got used to using a highway that was free. They started doing business moving freight there, or taking jobs and commuting on that nice fast convenient road, and ... now suddenly there's a gate.

Note, the work gets done anyway. The highway is still there. (And marginal cost of more people using it is ... low.)

That said, it's a matter of definition. Usually rent-seeking refers to manipulating public rules, public spending, etc. Here that seems close to impossible. (Broadcom exploit their vendor lock-in business position as much as they want, it's a purely private arrangement, no one is and no one was forced to start using Broadcom's shit.)

...

That said 2.0, rent in "rent-seeking" refers to a part of income (based on Adam Smith's division of income into profit, wage, and economic rent). Where economic rent is payment gained that's not justified by natural costs and market forces. (Of course, good luck coming up with a reliable model for this.) ...

However, here it seems we do know how to come up with the right numbers for profit and rent. Profit was what they were earning before and now ... any extra income is rent that they get by putting the gate down on the free lanes. (And, of course, as people will migrate away we'll see this rent decrease, likely substantially.)