Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

https://borncity.com/win/2024/01/13/order-license-chaos-for-vmware-products-after-broadcom-takeover-jan-2024/

by Findus23 • 3 years ago

108 82 3 years ago

I do recall several HN commenters called it back them when it was announced Broadcom would take over and cause a shit show.

ExoticPearTree• 3 years ago

Not much of shit show, but the speculation back then what that BRCM will split VMware into pieces, keep the most profitable parts and milk them as much as possible.

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.

chris_wot• 3 years ago

So… what are the alternatives?

gertrunde4• 3 years ago

They've also said they're trying to spin off the EUC element (i.e. Workspace One, Horizon and associated bits). (Potentially Carbon Black may be up for and exit as well).

Link: https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2023/12/an-exciting-new-era-for...

RockRobotRock• 3 years ago

You can find working vSphere keygens on some sketchy site. I encourage anyone in a tough spot to use one.

You paid for the product, fuck them.

dijit2• 3 years ago

I have long since believed this to be legal, though I'd like to understand if it is.

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.

laurowyn• 3 years ago

Certainly an interesting one.

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.

chii2• 3 years ago

but one or the other must be true.

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.

jasonjayr• 3 years ago

I have heard/read that should be audited by Microsoft or any of the other large software houses that do that, they don't care for any certificate of authenticity or license keys, or anything.

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.

op00to2• 3 years ago

It’s only a problem if you want to maintain support. If you’re ready to sever your Broadcom relationship, keygen away. I am not a lawyer, and am probably wrong.

elzbardico• 3 years ago

I thing the biggest risk with this comes from the DMCA, a stupidly heavy-handed piece of legislation that doesn't care at all about the consumers.

azalemeth• 3 years ago

Honestly that's the sad story behind drm in a nutshell. Pirates get a better product.

cesarb• 3 years ago

Pirates get a better product.

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.)

AviationAtom3• 3 years ago

So much so that even Microsoft support reps are using the pirating tools

gertrunde4• 3 years ago

No great surprise there.

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...

sofixa8• 3 years ago

It's embarrassing how poorly Broadcom have rushed into throwing the baby out with the bathwater for no reason. They could have taken a slower approach instead of doing everything as soon as the deal officially closed...

I hope they lose as much business as possible over this, everyone should be looking into alternatives because they're such a shitshow.

mixdup3• 3 years ago

Yeah, I don't get why they just did the Elon thing of slash and burn without any plan. I get that they want to upend the business model, focus on whatever end of the market, etc. Why not do that in a planned out, measured way? Why confirm literally every concern people had when the acquisition was announced? Why get yourself into what will obviously be a ton of lawsuits over people who can't use the product they already paid for?

newsclues2• 3 years ago

Why wait? Just do it and deal with the ill effects as soon as possible.

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.

The_Colonel2• 3 years ago

Most of the damage was already done during acquisition process (simply based on Broadcom's reputation). There simply isn't any incentive to deviate from the original plan to milk the customers.

grepfru_it3• 3 years ago

everyone should be looking into alternatives

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.

AviationAtom3• 3 years ago

OpenStack

sofixa8• 3 years ago

No two environments are the same. Instead of looking for a like for like total replacement (even though you actually don't use all VMware features or use some only because they were the only way possible in VMware's ecosystem and not because they're actually any good (vRA, Log Insight)), evaluate your actual needs and what do you need to run under what conditions. You'll probably end up discovering that any of Proxmox, OpenStack Nutanux, oVirt, Ganetti, Kubernetes (with or without KubeVirt), Nomad (with or without VMs) will cover most if not all that you need.

kotaKat• 3 years ago

Thanks, Broadcom. You've taken the one little bit of my job left I enjoyed and turned it into something I never want to touch again even in my personal life.

gminic• 3 years ago

Does this licensing problem affect the Spring Framework as well?

miohtama• 3 years ago

Another story on why vendor lock in is bad and you should only build your business on the top of open source products.

hitpointdrew3• 3 years ago

Like what? There is no real open source comparable option to VMware if are running your own hypervisors.

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.

icedchai3• 3 years ago

KVM works great. Do you think major cloud providers are building everything on VMware?

samsk• 3 years ago

Proxmox is quite good, it's not VMWare, but hey, it's not VMWare ;-)

athorax• 3 years ago

OpenStack is pretty okay these days

Teever• 3 years ago

Well yeah, this is at least as much a side effect of people not using open source solutions in the first place as it is the reason that people don't use open source VM solutions.

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.

sofixa8• 3 years ago

There is no real open source comparable option to VMware if are running your own hypervisors

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).

bdhcuidbebe• 3 years ago

Theres clouds built with KVM, you dont know your stuff.

vishesh92• 3 years ago

I am running Apache CloudStack with KVM in my homelab. Took me a couple of hours to set it up.

It might not have all of the features of VMWare but it just works.

thayne2• 3 years ago

Why does the SEC keep allowing acquisitions like this? And why are there not more legal consequences to this kind of behavior after an acquisition?

toast0• 3 years ago

Why would the SEC care? Shareholders of VMWare were properly compensated, and shareholders of Broadcom should know by now that Broadcom management seeks to buy companies and ruin their products. Nothing securities fraud about that.

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.

oarla• 3 years ago

Because it's not SEC's mandate to protect the consumer. If anything, FTC should have been the one to raise concern about this acquisition, but they have bigger fish to fry.

thayne2• 3 years ago

but they have bigger fish to fry.

My complaint isn't about a single acquisition. It is a pattern of allowing acquisitions that have resulted in worse outcomes for consumers.

hocktheman• 3 years ago

What an absolute shitshow. These are customers who have paid major $$$ for something they now can't redeem.

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")

Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

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