From Broadcom: End of General Availability of the Free VSphere Hypervisor
kb.vmware.com
kb.vmware.com
Hard to imagine what Broadcom's goal is with a 69 billion dollar acquisition, if they intend to burn all outreach, make their ecosystem inhospitable & obstruct onboarding.
Actually it's pretty clear? The company will force-convert/force-upsell a couple inept low-grade users for a couple years. Revenue will go up, managers will get promoted for making the graph go up.
But it seems likely to me that the effects of these moves on the VMware ecosystem won't be terminal per se - there are indeed entrenched users who won't quit - but that there will be a huge falling away, moving towards other products/ideas/technologies.
To Broadcom's advantage, not a lot of people right now give a shit about the legacy virtual machine world & model. Maybe they can pull this off & rise off these moves, not suffer, not bleed adoption & usage, remain something people keep using. But damn does it seem like a huge challenge to me. They can keep their market, and grow it short term, but vms feel like a slowly eroding position (especially with wasm coming to eat conventional containers lunch) that they're trying to maintain by making harder & more difficult to stay in & allow new practitioners into.