I hope they lose as much business as possible over this, everyone should be looking into alternatives because they're such a shitshow.
This way they get to slash costs with less staff and effectively fire the clients they don’t want.
They expect backlash and thinks it’s worth the cost, because they plan on milking the remaining customers asap.
I'm interested to hear this community's take on what an alternative to vmware is. And I'm not talking about just ESX, I'm talking about their entire ecosystem including vsphere and all of it's features that an enterprise environment depends on.
You paid for the product, fuck them.
Effectively: Software mechanisms are not the litmus of legality, as if you buy a working key, it may not be legal to use since there are country restrictions.
So I would surmise the opposite stance: if you have a license sitting on a shelf and you "assign" it to a system; using a keygen at that point is fine, since you do own a license and you are not oversubscribing it.
IANAL, but one or the other must be true.
They want to see a valid purchase order for the SKU of the license.
So, I think using a keygen might raise some red flags if the auditing software reports back the key even if it's the same SKU you paid for (and it had better be) but the proof of a paid order is what determines if you are licensed.
IANAL, but I believe the terms of the purchased license would be to use the product with only the license key provided. Therefore using an alternative key would be a breach of the license terms, meaning you're using unlicensed software and subject to all relevant laws.
I can see an argument that the vendor is in breach of contract by failing to provide a valid key with the license, and therefore the contract is void and the vendor should refund.
And yet again, I can see an argument that the license has been paid for, and a different key is used in the interim to access the paid for software, therefore no loss has occurred to either party rendering the whole argument moot.
Would be interested to know if this has been tested in the court system.
they are neither mutually exclusive, nor even related.
You have a key that opens a door to a house you dont own. Do you have permission, just because you got a key, to go in?
You lost a key to a house you have already been given permission to go in. You found out that there's actually a master key that you can get in the black market, which you buy to open that door to go into the house.
Your comment reminded me of this classic article: https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/
"If I choose open source, I don't have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing."
That is, it's not just pirates who get a better product; open source users get a better product too.
(Going back to the context of this thread: those who chose an open source alternative to the products in question have avoided all of this mess, even if they had to forsake some useful features for that.)
Orders/renewals for Symantec products were effectively impossible for about 18 months following their Broadcom experience.
IIRC, in the end they just gave everyone a 1-year subscription extension.
Edit: Ooops - that gets a mention at the bottom of the linked article...
KVM? Not even close, you need a host of other tools to get what you have with esxi and vcenter. You’ll spend months just finding and configuring a disjointed hodgepodge of tools to get what you could have setup in a day. And even then you have a fargile system that is likely to break any time you update one tool in your stack.
Well the first question is, do you actually need hypervisors? In a lot of cases, the answer is no, or not for many of the workloads. In others it's 100% yes.
Then, after you've decided you actually do need a hypervisor, there's actually tons of choice - Proxmox (very good and advanced KVM wrapper), Nutanix's AHV, oVirt (future kind of up in the air), OpenStack, KubeVirt, XCP-ng.
Problem is, many VMware users are set in their ways and want an exact and 1:1 replacement, without even considering they were only doings things that way because that was the only tool they knew and had at their disposal, not because it's actually a good way of doing things. Virtual Machines are just a means to an end, and a clunky one at that. VMware are actively pushing you away, time to start paying attention and considering what the organisation's actual needs are, and how are they best served. (And unless you're doing VDI, or almost exclusively using third party appliances delivered as VM images, that's not virtual machines).
If more people had used open source solutions in the first place then they wouldn't be in this situation that they find themselves in now.
It might not have all of the features of VMWare but it just works.
DOJ and FTC enforce anti-trust and are more likely to be gatekeepers fo acquisitions, but while Broadcom is big and VMWare is big... Broadcom is going to ruin the product and that's not going to increase their marketshare and market power, so what's the problem?
It's like complaining about PE buying a failing company and then it goes bankrupt 3-7 years later. PE just accelerates the path, Toys R Us was already dead.
My complaint isn't about a single acquisition. It is a pattern of allowing acquisitions that have resulted in worse outcomes for consumers.
So far two things happened: - a lot of people were laid off - VMware will turn into a subscription service, no more perpetual licenses on which you can bolt a support contract for updates.
Link: https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2023/12/an-exciting-new-era-for...
The sad thing is... this is nothing compared to what they've done to their cloud providers (formerly known as VCPP partners)... All resellers and cloud partners got a letter in december ending the program, with the 'good news' that some of them would be invited back somewhere early in 2024. The rest will have to turn off their workloads by end of March.
So these 4500+ cloud providers now (including the likes of OVH, Rackspace, IBM, ...) are now in limbo. Some will know next week or early feb if they can still legally host their customer's workloads. Else they will have 6 weeks (!) to migrate away to one of the partners that made the cut. Ignoring that many of these cloud partners have multi-year contracts with their end customers (which include banks, hospitals, public sector, ... especially the niche kind of environments that often have boutique requirements that make them unsuitable for an easy public cloud migration) they can now no longer fulfill.
Oh, and the license aggregator partners that used to run the admin side of this business and help those partners? They're being reduced to 10 worldwide too, and they're also in the dark.
At least their SaaS partners have a clear message: that business is dead. ("sunset")
