Ask HN: What are you vendor lock-in war stories?

3 points by ddadon10 2y ago ↗ HN

The typical argument to choose a proprietary solution is this: "Focus on your delivering value to your customers now and you will see the rest later."

While I think this is a very valid argument, I am curious if you had some worst-case scenarios or "war stories" to share about vendor lock-in that had a really bad impact on the business, like a database vendor that drastically hikes its prices or a critical vendor that simply shuts down, etc.

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favourable 2y ago ↗

VMware. I used a pirate copy of VMWare about a decade ago, and they detected it was pirated and I was forced to cough up some coins, lest my VMs all became useless, and I had some important VMs which were mission critical to my startup. I have since switched to QEMU though. The migration was painless enough.