VMware perpetual license holders receive cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom
a year ago by themachinestops to c/technology
MBAs
The CIA
Project Oracle babyyyy
I think it had something to do with Broadcom wanting to go for a few big customers and don't want to deal with the small fry anymore.
Surely no competitors will grow in the small and medium business market to eventually be a competitor...
Broadcom knows they bought a dying platform. Their strategy is to isolate the customers incapable of ever migrating and charge them as close to near bankruptcy as possible. They’ll get their initial return on investment in under 5 years and then eventually just let VMware die because new businesses that are still nimble all moved to other platforms anyway. They’ll hit Lotto tickets with a few whales and keep 5-10 devs on to patch stuff for those whales and print 100-1000x return on costs in perpetuity.
That is ... bleak.
I suspect you are correct.
RemindMe in 5 years
#I know that doesn't work here
It's a valid business strategy to kick your low-paying customers to the curb and focus on the big spenders. Did the same with my little PC business back in the day. The small fry cost shitloads to support and are generally more bitchy.
But HOLY shit did Broadcom kick 'em down. I've never seen such an in-your-face business move to squeeze the cash cow as hard as possible, tank the company, grab the money and run.
People can say, and have been from day-1, "I'll never use their shit again!" That's fine with Broadcom, it's literally their plan.
Especially those who are perfectly in the right legally and morally.
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.
*Humanity problem.
There are some solutions invented, but they require work and revolutionary wars. And the functioning system, I think, will be as close to ancap as to Trotskyism. Won't be clearly "socialist".
No, this is not a humanity problem. This is a capitalism problem. Companies are not beholding to their customers, they are beholden to stock owners. It is no longer in their best interest to make customers happy, it’s in their best interest to provide ROI for their investors. Every software product hits a point of diminishing returns. There are no new amazing features to woo new customers, it is a mature product that only has incremental features. When this happens, you either flip to a subscription model and parasitize your user base, or sell to another vendor, management group, or some other entity who does it after you’ve been paid out. If we had better controls on mergers and buyouts there would be active competition to foster diversity and keep prices down, but when companies buy all their competition and all of the small companies who make products and enhancements for their base, it’s a lose lose situation for the end users. This is my jaded two cents after a quarter century of being in the IT/AEC field in the direct line of this enshittification process from multiple companies across the spectrum.
Proxmox is already perfect (for my use case)
Yes, that’s a more correct use of “prisoners dilemma:” a choice to either cooperate or defect. Origin below, for the curious.
The dilemma
Two prisoners are interrogated in separate rooms. Each is asked to snitch in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Because they’re separated, the prisoners can’t coordinate, but each knows the other is offered the same deal and the interrogator will only offer bargains that increase their combined years of imprisonment.
For example, “house wins” if snitch gets -2 years and snitchee gets +3 years, since interrogator would net +1 year from the deal.
So what will each prisoner do?
The result
Of course, the best outcome overall is for neither to snitch, and the worst is for both to snitch.
The Nobel-Prize-winning observation was that any prisoner faced with this dilemma (once) will always net a lesser sentence if they snitch than if they don’t, no matter what the other decides.
In other words, two perfect players of this game will always arrive at the worst result (assuming they only expect to play once). This principle came to be known as the Nash equilibrium.
Applications
The result above sounds bleak because it is, but real-world analogs of this game are rarely one-offs and thus entail trust, mutuality, etc.
For example, if the prisoners expect to play this game an indeterminate number of times, the strategy above nearly always loses (the optimal strategy, in case you’re wondering, is called “tit-for-tat” and entails simply doing whatever your opponent did last round).
The study of such logic problems and the strategies to solve them is called game theory.
Edit: fixed typo, added headings and links
You should take a look at Canonical's LXD. They've been investing in it pretty heavily and can definitely rival proxmox.
The web based UI is superb and I've never had issues with the CLI which is quite a contrast to my experience with proxmox
Not really. Incus is a fork of LXD that's carrying the torch for community focused containers.
Or kick Canonical to the curb and use Incus instead: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/...
Yeah, it's a distro of kubernetes.
Most apps run best as a container, but for appliances and legacy apps they have Openshift virtualization which runs VMs in the cluster by running KVM inside of docker.
The open source tech there is called Kubevirt. All VMs are 1st class citizens in the kubernetes API, so it is actually easier to run than VMware/Proxmox if you already have a Kubernetes cluster and you're not doing complex stuff with qcow images or VM migrations.
I use both containers and VMs a lot with Kubernetes at work.
There’s Openshift Virtualization included, which is based on the upstream kubevirt project. You’re essentially running VMs in containers and managing them (mostly) like the other container workloads in the environment.
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.
Dunno, Larry well understands what he does unlike most tech CEOs and owners today. Oracle was allied to Sun at some point. Larry has that demonic appearance, but he's less of a threat than literally anybody else of them. Especially since Larry already has enormous power which he abuses less than expected.
You're talking the CEO of a company who sued Google on the premise that header files, a descriptor file for what commands can be used and what parameters they took, should be copyrighted? The CEO who poisoned the OpenOffice community so thoroughly that the fork, LibreOffice, was founded by the leaders of OpenOffice and became the de facto standard instead of the original, and it happened overnight? That guy?
Citation needed on literally all points. Fuck Oracle, fuck Sun, and fuck Larry Ellison
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
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.
I would recommend it. I also started with VirtualBox and made my way over to GNOME Boxes. Anything else will have a learning curve, but in the end, I found the alternatives work better once you wrap your head around them and you don’t ever need to worry about Oracle pulling the rug from under you.
Virt-manager is a GUI for libvirt, which can use several hypervisors, including KVM/QEMU, and it works great.
There's several other clients for libvirt, including GNOME Boxes, Cockpit (web based), and virsh (CLI).
Boxes is very well-organized and easy to use.
Proxmox ftw
Proxmox is amazing.
We told them to go fuck themselves. We retain lawyer specifically in case we have legal concerns, and the way we use their products, price jack up would be so extreme that it’s entirely worth risking it while we migrate away.
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.
The strategy, from day-1, was to dump low-tier customers and squeeze the big dogs. They knew this wasn't a viable long-term plan. Broadcom knew they had captive customers in the large enterprise space who would take years to migrate. They want to rape all they can, cash out and kill the product someday. But hey! As long as they can squeeze, they will do so.
I mean, fuck me, Oracle is still in business and that's the model Broadcom is going for.
Yeah. Let's not get started on fucking Oracle. We'll be here all day. Or year, possibly.
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.
I realize there's all sorts of Microsoft hate out there, mostly justified, but no one has mentioned hyper-v as a replacement for VMware. I've got a dozen or so machines running on a single VMware host and after the broadcom buyout decided to swap over, havent pulled the trigger yet as I'm using it to get a new server and wait for our support contract to end.
In the small/medium business space is proxmox a better bet?
Openshift kind of incidentally does virtualization almost begrudgingly. Red hat started to try to be a VMware competitor with ovirt but find VMware customers too stuck in their ways, then abandoned it to chase the cloud buzz word with open stack, but open stack was never that good and also the market for people who want to make their on premise stuff act like a cloud provider is actually not that big anyway. So they hopped on the container buzzword with open shift and stuck libvirt management in there to have an excuse for virtualization customers that there is a migration path for them.
Meanwhile proxmox scratched their head wondering why everyone was fixated on stacking abstraction layer upon abstraction layer on libvirt and just directly managed the qemu. Which frankly makes their stuff a lot more straightforward technically, and their implementation is a solid realization of the sort of experience that VMware provides. In fact much more straightforward than a typical VMware deployment, and easier to care and feed since it is natively Linux instead of an OS pretending not to be an os like esxi. It also is consistent to manage, unlike VMware where you must at least interact some with esxi but that's deliberately crippled and then you have to do things a bit differently as you deploy center (which can be weirdly convoluted).
I'd say that if you tend to like Microsoft products, then hyper v. If you tend to be annoyed by then but like Linux, then proxmox is great. It manages to be a good blend of approachable with a GUI but also having solid API and cli that didn't overly abstract things away from the underlying implementation
But if you aren't really a Linux person, then I'd wager hyper v is the right direction.
Hyper-V could literally suck my dick all day and I still wouldn't use it if there's a non-microsoft option that works. Not interested in being the test group for any more of their shit or get rug-pulled at the worst moment.
I haven’t yet set up proxmox, but yeah, I think hyper-V would work well in a small to medium windows shop.
The negatives I found probably don’t apply
- for large installations, it never scaled as well as VMware. We saved millions on licenses when we switched, but had to buy a lot more hardware. In particular we were doing software QA where we needed many VMs but they didn’t need much resources, and hyper-v just couldn’t scale in that direction. More standard use cases probably won’t have this problem, plus this was 4 years ago so I don’t know if anything has changed
- for special case installations, hyper-v was a horrible experience on my laptop. I had the resources, but couldn’t pass through usb devices, and it kept messing up my networking.
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.
The article says the letter demanded they uninstall updates to the point before their contract ended.
It also says this same letter has been going out to users days after their contracts expired, regardless of whether any updates had been installed and even if the user had migrated to another service.
Exactly, if their software keeps working and allowing updates and they don't know what the end user is doing then it's a them problem. If they didn't bake in telemetrics to know what version each license key is using then it's on them.
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)
And virt-manager is pretty solid for hobbyist tinkering too.
Yeah I'd second that. It's good for discovering valid settings as you get start, and then once you want to do more complicated stuff, the XML option view becomes useful, and then if you want to try on CLI after all you can start using virsh to administer the same VMs.
At least that's how I progressed through the stages as I started messing with a Windows VM for a game that doesn't lend itself to hosting on Linux natively.
I would argue for Apache Cloudstack personally.
Though I have used and like Proxmox as well.
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!
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.
A move this dumb will totally work out in thier favor. /S
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.
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.
So, it seems that companies' infrastructure was already entrenched with VMware, and now Broadcom is trying to leverage the fact that VMware is already being used to squeeze more money out of its acquisition?
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Threatening to sue your customers is such a brilliant business move.
save