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.
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.
I assume keys are another facet of keeping specific details around licenses vague enough that there's always room for MSFT to argue or bargain.
I never got the impression they cared where the keys came from. We knew exactly when they were coming every year. They were easy to deal with and I don’t recall ever having any issues.
We also had an ELA with VMware and they were awful. We only stuck with them because the software fulfilled a need. They treat you like dirt during the sale and every renewal. In between, they act as if they’re the ones doing you a favor by allowing you to be a customer. The support was terrible.
But oddly enough, they always gave us more licenses than we paid for. Every time, they would throw in products we didn’t purchase and weren’t cheap about it either. It was always like 100+ seats and one time it was 1000.
If I recall correctly, CALs don't really get 'installed', so my guess is that going off of 'provable licenses' keeps the audit process more uniform and streamlined.
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.
That's actually legal.
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.)
Curious: what does VMWare do that you can't do using Xen, KVM etc? Why was VMWare worth a billion?
I used to use VMWare ages ago (free version). It had nice GUIs; ad-hoc VM setup and management was miles easier than Xen (my driver). But most VM setup isn't ad-hoc, and isn't done through a UI, it's done through automation.
Broadcom seems to be a mean, nasty company: "Everyone hates us, we don't care."
The fact that open source exists today is because there are charitable people out there that are contributing it for free (or effectively free). Some business models employ open source as a marketing strategy for their paid parts, which is inevitably what you really would need (and thus have the "licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing" problem).
In the end, the pirate's product is free because they can make it free for way less effort, at the cost of the original creator of that software. While it's arguable that the piratee does not really do harm, as they wouldn't have paid for said software anyway, it is the original creator of the software that borne the cost of its creation.
* except in niches