69 ... Nice.
I hope this doesn't end badly for VMware. I use VMware exclusively in a professional setting, and partially in a personal setting. With everything I've seen it's by far the most stable (Qemu seems to be close to bare metal in ideal conditions, but can get a little quirky at times to say the least) and beats out virtualbox in both performance and stability.
If it's mostly in cash & stocks hopefully from my layman's view they're buying a valuable asset and not going to enshitify it for a quick buck when the debt bill comes in with an uncertain economy.
Bringing back memories of my own. Mandrake in 2004 was a but before my time, but I'm sure I've still got my Ubuntu discs I downloaded at the local library and burned myself almost a decade after this Mandrake disk.