VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom
VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom
Broadcom says it may audit VMware users.
Remember:
There's no such thing as a perpetual license, there's only "until we change our mind" licenses
Threatening to sue your customers is such a brilliant business move.
Right? That's what encouraged me to sail the high seas.
The RIAA special
The not owning anything is ridiculous. We need clear regulation that makes it so companies cant do bullcrap like this. If I buy something, I own it, period.
100% agreed.
Here's a relevant Louis Rossmann video where a US Senator (Ron Wyden) officially asked the FTC to look into issues like this. I sincerely hope something comes out of this.
At this point, why would anyone do business with broadcom at all?
Because they make all the cheap ethernet chips that go on motherboards.
Other than that, can't think of a good reason.
Where would we be without predatory rent-seeking?
Someone's going to make a fortune migrating firms off VMWare onto open-source VMs.
Man could you imagine what proxmox would be if that project got just a tenth of the money VMware got?
Classic prisoners dilemma. Nobody wants to invest in proxmox because not enough people invest in proxmox.
Honestly I think if Proxmox got VMWare money then they’d become stuffed to the gills with business sharks and probably go the same route eventually.
That is not a Proxmox problem, that is a capitalism problem.
Proxmox is already perfect (for my use case)
Suse has been trying pretty hard with Harvester. KVM-based, VMs-as-k8s-pods which leverages all existing k8s tooling, as well as the same multi-cluster federation as RKE2.
Seems pretty great from afar, though it's very much under active development.
I know people in that predicament and they're, charitably, helpless little babies when you tell them to read two paragraphs of documentation on how to run one command in a Linux CLI.
Fundamentally nothing out there really caters to the needs of resellers. Your average resale company couldn't automate a backup job to save itself from bankruptcy if it doesn't come with a neat GUI, a 24/7 support contract, and preferably a Microsoft or oracle logo somewhere in the corner to inspire confidence.
Like I jest but there are Microsoft outfits and FOSS outfits and there is essentially zero professional overlap even though they both sell IT products/solutions. The disconnect is a mile wide. Which translates to wildly different business models where the FOSS people have been running shit in containers for 15 years while the Microsoft slaves are still licensing their monolithic solutions by the CPU Core and doing weird-ass shit like buy 4-core xeons because it's more economical with these archaic licensing models.
So sure Proxmox/Suse are certainly very happy with their sales number right now but anecdotally I'm not seeing the migration frenzy that one would expect under such intense price gouging. Broadcom correctly identified that it will take years for these super corporate structures to steer away from "the way we've always done things" and in the meantime that's untold millions in additional short-term profits.
This is another good reminder to not use VMware nor VirtualBox for any reason.
I’m out of the loop. Why not virtualbox?
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
Because Oracle sucks donkey balls.
I don’t understand what these folks are saying. VirtualBox is community software. It does not matter that it comes from Oracle since it is fully libre/open.
I primarily use mac and when I need to quickly spin up a linux machine, parallels needs you to buy a new version every year or they wont support much, and fusion supports everything but its....vmware
It's free and works for me, why should I stop using Virtualbox?
Because it’s owned by Oracle and they’re the kings of malicious licensing. Using their software, even as an individual, with no intention of ever using it for work, gives them more power. Of course, if you ever even think about using it for work, then be prepared for the company you work for to be paying a huge bill or be sued.
Broadcom is where previously good softwares go to die.
Proxmox, Nutanix, Canonical and Incus must be quite happy with the new customers.
Proxmox is amazing.
Proxmox ftw
I really want to use Nutanix but they are the same price as VMware VCF and they don't support my existing hardware so I'd have to buy all new servers, just to pay the same price.
At first, I thought the products you were listing were "good softwares going to die". I was like "wut. Proxmox is fucking epic."
This is why KVM is a good option, or even Hyper-V for Windows hosts. The only problem with KVM Is graphical support for paravirtualized drivers is basic at best with no full 3D acceleration that I know of for Windows guests; virtio-win isn't exactly the best option graphically and QXL to my knowledge is even more lacking, but one can just pass a hardware GPU through over vfio-pci for that.
Unfortunately for Mac hosts, Apple has no KVM/Hyper-V equivalent so your best option for virtualization there is Parallels.
(and it's honestly kinda stupid that Apple can't build their own KVM equivalent into the Darwin kernel which macOS is based on)
There is a KVM equivalent on MacOS, Apple's Hypervisor virtualization framework.
KVM is just the kernel side, you need QEMU (for example) on userland. On MacOS you have now UTM.
I didn't even know that was a thing. Cool!
That seems unlikely to persuade those people to continue using VMware, but good luck with that business strat Broadcom.
Broadcom is doing an excellent job convincing their customers to stop using VMware. Such a good job that at Red Hat we've shifted strategies with OpenShift Virtualization to pick up those customers. For the longest time our Virt play was just a stop gap to containers, now it's a full blown product.
Kudos! I wish you the best of luck and hope for your success.
Sounds like a them problem if their software won't refuse to update without an active contract. If it keeps working and being able to be updated then it's on them.
NUTANIX AHV BITCHES! Download The Nutanix Bible and start learning it.
Very surprised that this is the only comment in this thread mentioning Nutanix.
I stupidly bought a VMWare Workstation license when I first got on the Windows 11 train. Bright eyed and bushy tailed and all that rubbish. My experience was such shit that I abandoned it all for Linux and Virtualbox.
Fuck Microsoft, fuck VMWare.
qemu ftw.
Why would anyone use it over qemu? Is this a business enterprise thing?
There is a major difference between running a vm on your desktop and orchestrating a fleet of highly available virtual machines. Just one example might be vmotion. You can move a virtual machine from one physical host to another in real time with 0 interruption to services running on that host.
That’s some incredible stuff. Now days you can use things like XCP-ng to do the same but VMware was ahead of the pack for a decade.
They started dying when they were squeezed between cloud hyper scalars and the cheaper alternative hypervisors that finally had caught up.
Then the corpse was bought by Broadcom who is currently trying to milk it before the body completely rots.
A move this dumb will totally work out in thier favor. /S
They're trying to kill it. Anything they can squeeze out of existing customers in the meantime is just gravy.
Did Fraudcom hire Prenda Law or something?
Isn't VMWare out of support anyway?
Not that I fault the users of it - a perpetual license is a perpetual licence and good luck with the C&D, but there are other options. Though I only know of OpenShift on RHEL.