Threatening to sue your customers is such a brilliant business move.
It’s also the business model of Oracle I think and they are wildly successful.
Who are Oracle’s customers?
MBAs
Anyone who uses Oracle DB or virtualbox in a corporate environment
I’m forced to work with Oracle databases, FML I hate it so much
Right? That’s what encouraged me to sail the high seas.
Especially those who are perfectly in the right legally and morally.
Where would we be without predatory rent-seeking?
Someone’s going to make a fortune migrating firms off VMWare onto open-source VMs.
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.
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?
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?
Oh. That part I didn’t know.
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?
Yeah, that was just the habit probably.
Bruh they’re a copywrite law firm (read as patent troll) with a database and a tech company attached. Pretty much all they do is fuck other people over
with a database and a tech company attached
There are three real DBMS options for enterprise - Oracle, PGSQL, MSSQL, and Oracle is the most powerful and least problematic of them.
I’m not sure why you would buy an open-source company/product, particularly a GPLv3 one, if you didn’t understand or agree with the premise. It’s probably the stupidest decision he made. I’m not saying I agree with his other decisions, but most of them made some kind of business sense. With this one, he would have saved a lot of time and effort and received the same value if he’d just spun OO.o off ASAP. The linked timeline kind of says it all.
I don’t get your confusion.
Sun buys StarOffice, Sun opensources it into OpenOffice and supports its development, Sun goes under and gets bought by Oracle with all its stuff.
Then yeah, Oracle killed most of what Sun was doing altruistically (or as part of their desktop\workstation strategy that didn’t transpire, who knows). Including OOO.
Citation needed on literally all points. Fuck Oracle, fuck Sun, and fuck Larry Ellison
Fuck Oracle,
Suppose so
fuck Sun,
Either you are so ignorant you don’t know what Sun was, or you are out of your fucking mind.
and fuck Larry Ellison
That’s up to everyone, I personally don’t find him that attractive
I do know what Sun was, and now they’re owned by Oracle. Fuck Sun
And “fuck” literally means “don’t fuck”
there’s no sun anymore. It’s oracle
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.
It’s for personal use only. Should I be switching to native Linux virtualization with KVM or something?
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.
Given how VMWare apparently is pulling this is wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll give it a shot. Worst case I learn something new!
and what to use instead? run qemu commands and all the preparation by hand?
there’s proxmox, but that’s not a desktop solution.
Virt-manager works ok
Broadcom is where previously good softwares go to die.
Proxmox, Nutanix, Canonical and Incus must be quite happy with the new customers.
Proxmox ftw
Proxmox is amazing.
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.
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.
Remember:
There’s no such thing as a perpetual license, there’s only “until we change our mind” licenses
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.
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.
That’s the thing, it doesn’t do updates. This is just to scare people into paying.
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.
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.
I was a happy camper with Hyper-V on server operating systems, was always a PITA on desktop versions though. Wonder if that’s changed. (Doubt.)
NUTANIX AHV BITCHES! Download The Nutanix Bible and start learning it.
Very surprised that this is the only comment in this thread mentioning Nutanix.
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.
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.
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?
Exactly.
Did Fraudcom hire Prenda Law or something?
