"Negative" views of Broadcom driving VMware migrations, rival says
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
You don't need a degree in business to surmise that short term profits will also skyrocket but you will eventually lose the market.
I had a meeting with IT where I was worried they were finally coming after my proxmox box they "didn't know about". Turns out they saw their vmware bill and suddenly had questions.
The end of a dead product is the same, but the financial reaper is betting they can make more money killing something quickly.
One solution would be putting something in the tax code such that donating the code to an open source foundation gives a bigger benefit than simply writing it off as a total loss and destroying it.
It does if that's the law. Every jurisdiction routinely overrules contracts as unenforceable on the basis of some overriding law, so it wouldn't even really be that unusual. Whether it's a good idea or not is another question and one that depends almost entirely on second, third and higher order effects.
There probably is a world where all software is libre software and we still see similar rates of development, but it's not at all clear how you could get there. Especially not if you cared about the damage caused by upending the business models of a significant fraction of the world economy.
Everyone who followed Broadcom (and that included many VMWare employees) knew exactly what was coming the moment the acquisition was announced.
But it doesn't matter anymore now, Broadcom's strategy is to drive the company into the ground while extracting as much as possible during the death spiral. So any future strategy is no longer relevant.
You don't make these kinds of sales when you're circling the drain, you do it when you can see that future coming for you.
Note: I’m not asking for the Reddit armchair kvetching about the evils of modern capitalism and the failings of line-must-go-up. I’m wondering why, when serious financial decision-makers are involved, it makes sense to blow something up rather than steadily take profits over time, even if those profits aren’t always going up.
Like a sitcom in the 7th season or a champion fighter approaching 40 you quit near the top.
They "suddenly" realized that many less people were willing to pay $7 for a bag of Doritos and that they had priced their product higher than they should have.
There's a curve, not unlike the Laffer Curve, that applies to everything you are selling; something that Broadcom is learning (though their stock has had crazy high appreciation over the last number of years!)
It's often called the Goldilocks price: not too much, not too little, but just right.
Lack of maintenance => lack of users.
I think I'm among the few in my peer group who hasn't yet started running Proxmox on their home server.
Highly recommended.
I switched from VMWare to Proxmox a few years ago because Proxmox supported a wider range of network cards that were more common in the cheap desktop computers I use in my homelab, whilst VMWare almost required an Intel network card (which was usually fine for server hardware).
It was a surprisingly easy transition that I have not regretted one bit. I'm not sure whether there that was an actual migration path, without reinstalling servers from scratch. Homelab meant it didn't quite have the requirements of a production system...
At this point they're more an enterprise scheme to maximize license profiteering for compatible software and OS "per core" licensing in conjunction with hardware platform providers. It'd be cool if the support were worth the price, but in most enterprise cases, you're going to save a lot of money if you pay enough full time staff to purchase, build, maintain, and operate a virtualization environment compared to what the enterprise platforms provide. In most cases, you'll save more than enough to keep a better specced system completely redundant with spare hardware on hand.
I'm told that Kubevirt with Kubernetes has also been a winner among customers post Broadcom acquisition who were really reluctant to go beyond VMware previously.
I would suggest at least a minimal Linux Server VM if you're running containers, underneath ProxMox or on a bare metal install if you don't need other virtualization on said server.
What would it take to see if one can get written for UTM or something like that?
The reason: No matter how I try, even as a registered customer, I can't find a way to download current versions.
When I run VMware Fusion it tells me there's a new version, with bug fixes, support for newer macOS, etc. Would I like to download it? (Months ago it said the URL to check for a new version was broken.). Sure, I click, update please. It takes me to a Broadcom page where I'm supposed to sign in or register, give it my personal and work details, then I can download the new version.
I login because I already have an account. In my account, I can see the older versions of VMware Fusion, including the one I'm already running, but the later two versions aren't showing. Even the minor-version increment from the one I'm using isn't showing. I click around until I find where current ones should be, it shows me files in a table. I click the file and it tells me: Not yet, the account is awaiting verification. Come back in a few days.
It's been stuck like that for months.
But wait! I used this account to get VMWare Fusion a year ago. It still lets me download the version I'm using. The account was already verified! Why does it require new account verification just to get a slightly different, minor-version increment with bug fixes of a free product?
Last time I went through this, I ended up using Homebrew. I had a legit Broadcome/VMware account, had signed the agreement to download the update, but Broadcom's site didn't work. So I was delighted to find it in brew, with vastly better packaging than Broadcom's. Unfortunately the brew package is now disabled.
Before that, I had to sign up with Broadcom a second time, because the first account appeared to lose its access to VMware Fusion. I don't know why. Before that, I had to sign up the first time with Broadcom, even though I already had a VMware account as a paying customer of VMware Fusion.
It's been a great product, which I used to pay for and would again. I've used it for over 10 years. It's free now, and still a great product.
Yet I'm looking at switching to Parallels just because Fusion's "free" download process is too broken to use.
I can't imagine Broadcom is making any money from blocking downloads of the supposedly free product. It was their decision to make it free! It must be disheartening to be a developer on VMware Fusion if you know this is going on.