I'm super impressed with what Dan has accomplished with wpcurve and his other ventures. He deserves every success and it should be a humbling reminder to aspiring people that if you can help enough people in the world you can be rewarded. The buyout by godaddy you can't honestly say you would really turn it down if you were in their position. Clearly they are getting well rewarded for creating a terrific system, helping so many people and onboarding all these people as wordpress techs. From godaddys perspective they have saved themselves a huge time and cost of setting up a wordpress support department. Making sure godaddy wordpress users have a good experience is a good aim, otherwise they might go find some other cms right? Godaddy are also making moves to contribute to the wp core and tech with self interest but thats to be expected.

I've no doubt that there are thousands of wp developers and companies that wish they had been the ones who made the systems that godaddy bought to support their growing wp userbase.

Big companies do this all the time, just usually its not so 'personal' because it doesn't affect us much if google buys some image software or microsoft buys a social media site or whatever.