>That is how the free-market works.
That is how a functioning free-market works. A free market requires competition to function, it fails miserably in the face of a monopoly. VMware has essentially had a monopoly in the virtualization space for a long time. MS gave up on Hyper-V, Redhat gave up on RHEV, Proxmox isn't large enterprise ready, Nutanix requires you to buy their whole stack so it isn't an actual hypervisor competitor.
This is a masterclass in why monopolies are bad, it doesn't reflect much of anything about the free market other than how horribly broken it is when there isn't proper competition.
If Ford decided to double the price of the F150, they'd find all their customers buying a Silverado or Ram within days. No such plug-in alternative exists for Global 500 VMware customers at the moment which is why Broadcom feels perfectly comfortable with this unapologetic money grab.