I have seen a lot of community money go down the Broadcom drain this month, at the tread of breaking a mission-critical platform's features by disabling a perpetual license, forcing a 9.5x license fee increase. Criminal.
Basically they are telling people whose support contract expired to stop using/installing newer patches (that they received/downloaded from "somewhere")
Doesn't sound too unreasonable to me...
If you prefer to run without support, you can of course still do that. But don't install newer patches then.
Ahh, you've read the article... Where's the fun in that! :-)
My minor personal grief is that I've had perpetual licenses for vsphere 6. In the transition to broadcom account, those have completely and utterly disappeared - if you read the details of 3rd level FAQ, by design. Ah well!
I think lawyers will decide whether they are dishonoring obligations or not.
The real tragedy to me is the loss of access for non massive customers. Vmware was smart to build a slope of adoption, from individual techies with curiosity and home labs, to small shops with simple needs, all the way through massive governmental or multinational behemoths. That ramp-up is being dismantled. They can ride current crop of enterprise customers for a long time -- but where is next batch going to come from? Which techies in which company in 10 years,who don't already have pervasive vmware footprint, will even begin to consider it?
correct me if I'm wrong, but the perpetual licenses under VMware also came with the requirement that you only get patches/updates as long as you pay for a support contract, right?
"perpetual" basically meant that your license doesn't suddenly expire, not that you get free lifetime patches/updates
I'm pretty sure "lifetime license" never meant what you think it did.
It just meant that the license itself doesn't suddenly expire (and render your VMware environment useless/non-working). It didn't mean that you get lifetime free updates. That was always tied to a support contract.
Moving to either proxmox or incus is the best choice for any business right now. Both are open source and offer enterprise plan, which is probably way less than VMware
I can’t speak to Incus but IIRC Proxmox isn’t a supported hypervisor for Red Hat deployments. I’m a fan, and I run it in my home lab, but that might be an issue in a business context if you’re running RHEL.
I have never heard of an acquisition go so badly as VMware. Thousands of links broken across the internet as the VMware forums are gone, same thing with the manuals. Broadcom is unable to make sales of new licenses because their internal migration of the user database didn't work. Just all avoidable errors.
I remember hearing how Broadcom would likely gut VMware once it got ahold of it, but this almost seems worse. I imagine it would also have been bad if the Qualcomm deal had gone through.
Their roots are in Hewlett-Packard, so I suppose this isn't that surprising.
I am not trying to be difficult - I know that I can now download VMware for both Windows and Mac, and two years ago I could not. And yet the article refers to ridiculous licensing fees and licenses.
Who needs to license, are there multiple products with the same name, and what "audit rights" are given to someone who installs the VMWare Pro player on their laptop?
I believe they made their consumer offering free for personal use, but their business offering prices went through the roof. That’s where all the problems are.
You know a vendor has substantial lockin when they can 10x the price, then liberally threaten to sue their customers, and their stock doesn't dive.
There's probably a substantial opportunity here for a consultant team to specialize in migrating VMs off this platform.
We're ridiculously busy with virt-v2v & Migration Toolkit for Virt at the moment. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/migrating-virtual-machines-vs... My message to Broadcom is please keep suing your own customers!
Merger with Oracle in the near future? They have almost identical tactics.
I have seen a lot of community money go down the Broadcom drain this month, at the tread of breaking a mission-critical platform's features by disabling a perpetual license, forcing a 9.5x license fee increase. Criminal.
Basically they are telling people whose support contract expired to stop using/installing newer patches (that they received/downloaded from "somewhere")
Doesn't sound too unreasonable to me...
If you prefer to run without support, you can of course still do that. But don't install newer patches then.
Ahh, you've read the article... Where's the fun in that! :-)
My minor personal grief is that I've had perpetual licenses for vsphere 6. In the transition to broadcom account, those have completely and utterly disappeared - if you read the details of 3rd level FAQ, by design. Ah well!
Can the acquiring company even decide to dishonour the acquired company’s legal obligations?
I think lawyers will decide whether they are dishonoring obligations or not.
The real tragedy to me is the loss of access for non massive customers. Vmware was smart to build a slope of adoption, from individual techies with curiosity and home labs, to small shops with simple needs, all the way through massive governmental or multinational behemoths. That ramp-up is being dismantled. They can ride current crop of enterprise customers for a long time -- but where is next batch going to come from? Which techies in which company in 10 years,who don't already have pervasive vmware footprint, will even begin to consider it?
> Which techies in which company in 10 years,who don't already have pervasive vmware footprint, will even begin to consider it?
Quite the opposite, actually - actively try to not fall into that trap.
SiriusXM tried to weasel out of Lifetime subscription obligations and lost in a class action.
Did you, there were people getting it days after there contract expired
correct me if I'm wrong, but the perpetual licenses under VMware also came with the requirement that you only get patches/updates as long as you pay for a support contract, right?
"perpetual" basically meant that your license doesn't suddenly expire, not that you get free lifetime patches/updates
You don't think it's unreasonable to sell a 'lifetime' license and then go like "haha fooled you bro, gotta pay up now"?
I'm pretty sure "lifetime license" never meant what you think it did.
It just meant that the license itself doesn't suddenly expire (and render your VMware environment useless/non-working). It didn't mean that you get lifetime free updates. That was always tied to a support contract.
Moving to either proxmox or incus is the best choice for any business right now. Both are open source and offer enterprise plan, which is probably way less than VMware
I just set up my first Incus machine, and it was a joy.
I can’t speak to Incus but IIRC Proxmox isn’t a supported hypervisor for Red Hat deployments. I’m a fan, and I run it in my home lab, but that might be an issue in a business context if you’re running RHEL.
https://access.redhat.com/articles/886983
I have never heard of an acquisition go so badly as VMware. Thousands of links broken across the internet as the VMware forums are gone, same thing with the manuals. Broadcom is unable to make sales of new licenses because their internal migration of the user database didn't work. Just all avoidable errors.
I remember hearing how Broadcom would likely gut VMware once it got ahold of it, but this almost seems worse. I imagine it would also have been bad if the Qualcomm deal had gone through.
Their roots are in Hewlett-Packard, so I suppose this isn't that surprising.
Didn't VMWare make their products free?
I am not trying to be difficult - I know that I can now download VMware for both Windows and Mac, and two years ago I could not. And yet the article refers to ridiculous licensing fees and licenses.
Who needs to license, are there multiple products with the same name, and what "audit rights" are given to someone who installs the VMWare Pro player on their laptop?
I believe they made their consumer offering free for personal use, but their business offering prices went through the roof. That’s where all the problems are.
This is a slight tangent, but with Spring being owned by VMware, what do you think it's future looks like?
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Too much, or exactly as toxic as Broadcom's lawyers?