VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom

You know a vendor has substantial lockin when they can 10x the price, then liberally threaten to sue their customers, and their stock doesn&#x27;t dive.<p>There&#x27;s probably a substantial opportunity here for a consultant team to specialize in migrating VMs off this platform.

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&#x27;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&#x2F;installing newer patches (that they received&#x2F;downloaded from &quot;somewhere&quot;)<p>Doesn&#x27;t sound too unreasonable to me...<p>If you prefer to run without support, you can of course still do that. But don&#x27;t install newer patches then.

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 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&#x27;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.<p>Their roots are in Hewlett-Packard, so I suppose this isn&#x27;t that surprising.

Didn&#x27;t VMWare make their products free?<p>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.<p>Who needs to license, are there multiple products with the same name, and what &quot;audit rights&quot; are given to someone who installs the VMWare Pro player on their laptop?

This is a slight tangent, but with Spring being owned by VMware, what do you think it&#x27;s future looks like?

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