The irony is they want to ride the new wave of public cloud computing, going so far as to sponsor development of a memory database (Redis), and then go and do something regressive like slapping a 24GB-per-CPU memory limit on their core product without a price decrease.
I forget if it was the 2.x -> 3.x or 3.x -> 4.x upgrade, but they eventually dropped the hobby/academic cheap licensing and the price jumped to something like $150 per seat. I remember calling our sales contact and complaining about how much the jump sucked, and when they wouldn't budge, I essentially told no thanks and that I'd wait for the open source options to mature. He, of course, chuckled at this quaint notion.
A few years later I had to chuckle back when they started giving away the basic versions of VMWare, since open source options and Microsoft were by then eating their lunch on the desktop.
Funny how history repeats itself. I hope VMWare lives to regret this latest trend in greed of theirs.
P.S. -- I also had a similar exchange with the Accelerated X folks, back when xfree86 didn't do multi-head very well (or at all). I accused them of gouging their faithful customers and that open source would catch up and they'd be toast. Three cheers for xorg!
But I guess if your box needs 24GB then you probably have cash no?
But honestly, that's not the right way to think about the licensing. Sure, you need a license for each physical cpu, but beyond that you're just licensing for vRAM. So the real question is, is 24GB vRAM per license low.
Several people have calculated that a vSphere license costs much more than the RAM itself.