His offering is highly germane to the conversation, and quite likely helpful to a lot of people reading through the comments. We're (largely) a community of makers, and it's totally fine to mention what you've made in the appropriate contexts. This is but one (good) example.

It is crazy timing from his point of view. Crazy perfect timing. He was going to advertise it anyway, and now he has lots more people that would be interested. And in fact, it is relevant to this news.

I like to kid that every time we read "Google bought company A", that salespeople from Company A's competitors get busy.

Until Company B gets bought out...

I understand where you are coming from but it's more like, "standby while I share something my team and I have been working really hard on that is relevant to the news and who are interested in MDM".

I'm genuinely curious: how is that not advertising your product?

It's advertising, but perfectly legitimate in the context. Many people in this thread are probably looking for an alternative now, so they might well be happy to see this mention.

Besides that it's also a personal story "I've been working on a competitor for a while and this is weirdly nicely timed".

A few months ago burtonator was under almost every article advertising his project ("Javascript? During the development of Polar Bookshelf (getpolarized.io) I have used Javascript!"), which I personally found a lot more annoying.

In the sea of close to 100% of pointless ads you quickly forget that they are actually supposed to make you aware of something you want. For many people in this thread that has probably succeeded.

Unless it allows you to own all your data - how it is different and what is the guarantee they won't be acquired in the same way and leave all their customers to look for a third service?

not all advertising is soullessly cynical