VMware Perpetual License Holders Receive Cease-And-Desist Letters From Broadcom (arstechnica.com) 64
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Broadcom has been sending cease-and-desist letters to owners of VMware perpetual licenses with expired support contracts, Ars Technica has confirmed. Following its November 2023 acquisition of VMware, Broadcom ended VMware perpetual license sales. Users with perpetual licenses can still use the software they bought, but they are unable to renew support services unless they had a pre-existing contract enabling them to do so. The controversial move aims to push VMware users to buy subscriptions to VMware products bundled such that associated costs have increased by 300 percent or, in some cases, more. Some customers have opted to continue using VMware unsupported, often as they research alternatives, such as VMware rivals or devirtualization.
Over the past weeks, some users running VMware unsupported have reported receiving cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom informing them that their contract with VMware and, thus, their right to receive support services, has expired. The letter [PDF], reviewed by Ars Technica and signed by Broadcom managing director Michael Brown, tells users that they are to stop using any maintenance releases/updates, minor releases, major releases/upgrades extensions, enhancements, patches, bug fixes, or security patches, save for zero-day security patches, issued since their support contract ended.
The letter tells users that the implementation of any such updates "past the Expiration Date must be immediately removed/deinstalled," adding: "Any such use of Support past the Expiration Date constitutes a material breach of the Agreement with VMware and an infringement of VMware's intellectual property rights, potentially resulting in claims for enhanced damages and attorneys' fees." [...] The cease-and-desist letters also tell recipients that they could be subject to auditing: "Failure to comply with [post-expiration reporting] requirements may result in a breach of the Agreement by Customer[,] and VMware may exercise its right to audit Customer as well as any other available contractual or legal remedy."
Over the past weeks, some users running VMware unsupported have reported receiving cease-and-desist letters from Broadcom informing them that their contract with VMware and, thus, their right to receive support services, has expired. The letter [PDF], reviewed by Ars Technica and signed by Broadcom managing director Michael Brown, tells users that they are to stop using any maintenance releases/updates, minor releases, major releases/upgrades extensions, enhancements, patches, bug fixes, or security patches, save for zero-day security patches, issued since their support contract ended.
The letter tells users that the implementation of any such updates "past the Expiration Date must be immediately removed/deinstalled," adding: "Any such use of Support past the Expiration Date constitutes a material breach of the Agreement with VMware and an infringement of VMware's intellectual property rights, potentially resulting in claims for enhanced damages and attorneys' fees." [...] The cease-and-desist letters also tell recipients that they could be subject to auditing: "Failure to comply with [post-expiration reporting] requirements may result in a breach of the Agreement by Customer[,] and VMware may exercise its right to audit Customer as well as any other available contractual or legal remedy."
Best to move on (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be best to completely dump this company and move on. Let Broadcom burn in the dumpster fire they have created.
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NO, wait!
The American Bar Association totally endorses this move. Litigation is at the core of the US Economy! Broadcom is ready.
They double-dog dare you to continue to use VMWare!
This is about Customer Service and Support! Perpetual License? We were just KIDDING!! (did you hear that, Wall Street?)
There's been a lot of market consolidation (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't completely ignore antitrust law enforcement for 40 years without consequences. And we're just getting started with those.
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Agreed
Re:There's been a lot of market consolidation (Score:4, Interesting)
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Even the "free" Microsoft Hyper-V Server, based on Windows Server Core, isn't that great. You still need a Windows desktop with the Hyper-V Administrative Tools snap-in to manage it (or PowerShell).
On top of that, Microsoft still can't figure out how to get memory ballooning/oversubscription to work as well as it does in VMware or even KVM. Even VirtualBox does this perfectly. What's Microsoft's problem, anyway?
Re:There's been a lot of market consolidation (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft still can't figure out how to get memory ballooning/oversubscription to work as well as it does in VMware or even KVM.
This is true... But just do the math; Doubling the amount of physical RAM on the servers is still much Less expensive than paying the new difference in cost b/w Microsoft and Broadcom.
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You can't completely ignore antitrust law enforcement for 40 years without consequences. And we're just getting started with those.
You have a new, corrupt, government; buying a seat at Trump's dinner table for $1 million [wired.com] should ensure that consequences continue to be ignored.
Honestly the real problem is moral panics (Score:2)
And of course good old-fashioned racism.
It is so easy to get people distracted. Half the country is losing their shit over immigrants instead of asking why they don't get a cut of the immigrant labor.
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The problem is our enforcement mechanisms for both detecting, investigating, and responding to Antitrust violations are both cumbersome; much slower than the violators, and too easily manipulated by the violators. The large corporations walk all over the law, etc.
At a minimum I would say we need to adjust the law so that customers have standing to sue for anticompetitive practices and allege antitrust violations. Currently only the government itself can occassionally act on behalf of the public, and th
Re:Best to move on (Score:5, Interesting)
I have/had 122 sites running on ESXi free and using a scripted management solution that kept me from having to use vcenter. I am in the process of migrating all sites to Proxmox and so far LOVING proxmox over vmware esxi. Superior in nearly every way especially for someone using scripting to manage the locations like I do. Dropping vmware like hotcakes and will find some way to urinate and defecate on them before I drop the last one. Screw broadcom. I hope they burn to the ground.
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Well, the real issue may be that people operate private clouds without understanding what they are doing. Vendor-"strategy" this is usually called and it is obviously a complete fail.
Re: Best to move on (Score:2)
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I have/had 122 sites running on ESXi free and using a scripted management solution that kept me from having to use vcenter. I am in the process of migrating all sites to Proxmox and so far LOVING proxmox over vmware esxi. Superior in nearly every way especially for someone using scripting to manage the locations like I do.
While I like and use Proxmox as well, there are features it doesn't have that VCenter does. A prime example would be the ability to automatically power down and up nodes in a cluster as needed depending on load, as well as dynamically moving VMs around within the cluster to "even out" the load.
And yes, I agree that VMWare should be a considered a dead end product that everyone should avoid if possible, but it still has enterprise features that don't seem to be available elsewhere yet.
Re:Best to move on (Score:4, Insightful)
ability to automatically power down and up nodes in a cluster as needed depending on load, as well as dynamically moving VMs around within the cluster to "even out" the load.
These were useful abilities for hardware optimization. The problem is Broadcom now priced the product so high your license purchase will eliminate savings these features provided.
They've practically made it justifiable to spend 3x as much on servers as a one time purchase; Eliminate overprovisioning for RAM; Manually place your workloads, and for critical VMs run HA clustering inside the application or guest OS instead of at the hypervisor layer.
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That is really the only smart tech decision here: Drop VMWare. Waiting only makes things more expensive.
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Best, yes. I'm not sure what they are on about sending Cease and Decists to their own customers though; it sounds ridiculous.
VMware perpetual licensees paid up for All updates and "bugfixes" that later get released within the same major version of vSphere they purchased. That is how VMware always sold their product, and is what it means to purchase "vSphere 7", for example. Your perpetual licensees don't pay for merely the bugfixes or updates released within a subscription - customers paid for vSphere
Enshitification in Action (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a company going down the drain, just because some newb MBAs have decided they can increase prices to infinity, and as long as one customer remains, they come out ahead.
How can they claim that a) the support contract has expired, but b) Broadcom still has a right to audit the customer? They seem to want it both ways, and judges do not usually agree with that.
Re:Enshitification in Action (Score:5, Informative)
This is a company going down the drain, just because some newb MBAs have decided they can increase prices to infinity, and as long as one customer remains, they come out ahead.
It's working for Broadcom at the moment: revenue for their VMWare products is up.
https://www.theregister.com/20... [theregister.com]
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This is a company going down the drain, just because some newb MBAs have decided they can increase prices to infinity, and as long as one customer remains, they come out ahead.
No, this is Broadcom.
Their entire intent in buying VMware was to eliminate it immediately.
This is what Broadcom does. They will find the acquired companies top 10 (yes TEN) customers to keep and tell everyone else to fuck off the products are no longer for sale.
VMware just had too many existing contracts for Broadcom to do this all within a single day.
Mark my words, 3 years and 1 day after the acquisition date, and unless your company already pays them more than most small countries have, Broadcom will the
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When Oracle started pestering us for Java license fees, I wonder if they knew we were using java (openjdk) for exactly one single process on a single machine. As it happened, since we were using openjdk, we didn't owe oracle anything.
But even if hypothetically any java derivative suddenly required us to pay Oracle, I would've dropped java immediately and rewritten the app in C++ or rust or go.
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It's not like those top 10 are getting a good deal either ... top 10 muppets.
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We need to have a government tax on the environmental impact of corporate acquisitions.
Because the carbon footprint on this one is probably going to add up to trillions of dollars just in the cost in terms of man hours in software migrations and reduced efficiencies for customers alone.
Re: Enshitification in Action (Score:2)
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How can they claim that a) the support contract has expired, but b) Broadcom still has a right to audit the customer? They seem to want it both ways, and judges do not usually agree with that.
I think the claim is that "You don't have a support contract with us but you are using (patched) releases of our software that were only available after your contract expired. You are not licensed to use these versions, so you must have obtained those newer versions illegally, knock it off."
I am not trying to apologize for Broadcom, and I think what they are doing to VMWare sucks, but you asked "how can they claim this?", and I think this is how.
What a great way to alienate your former customers (Score:5, Interesting)
If these companies were trying to move away from Broadcom, now they'll try even more.
Personally, except for the early VMWare years, I do not see why companies would have decided to go with WMWare for new deployments. The product is full of bugs, the APIs needlessly complex to use, and the client libraries are very poorly maintained, even more so since the acquisition.
Over 10y ago, we used their OVF 'tool' and they stopped updating it. It was not able to create OVFs for newer versions of Linux. I got into the 'tool', which was itself a Virtual Appliance. It was a bunch of shell, perl and python scripts that hardcoded XML document generation between each other. I had to patch both python and perl code so they could generate/read XML that was 'compatible' between each other. Neither code used off the shelf XML parsing/generating libraries. I guess the whole thing was put together by interns, and nobody wanted to maintain it.
VMWare, Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft ... I won't miss them.
Re: What a great way to alienate your former custo (Score:2)
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vCenter is absurdly bloated and has been for years. It's an embarrassment.
I've moved on to Promox (KVM) and some of my cloud providers have moved to KVM, too, and nothing of value was lost.
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One issue with B2B is that eventually the product is designed by the sales teams. They will tell the product team that a customer will not sign a contract unless a niche functionality is implemented and then it get prioritized over the security and maintainability of the overall platform. Rinse and repeat and you end up with an Enterprise product where 95% of the features are used by no-one.
CEOs like it because it gives them the impression of having a moat around their company that is difficult for others t
There is no such thing as (Score:2)
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My Rolex says otherwise.
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Let's Implode Our Brand (Score:5, Interesting)
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They are trying to emulate Caldera. Who is Caldera, you might ask.... :)
What does that even mean? (Score:3)
security patches, save for zero-day security patches
I don't even know what 0-day patch is, I understand what 0-day vulnerability is.
Do they mean you can use patches for vulnerabilities that were disclosed before your support contract ended but the patch was issued after?
Makes not sense
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It means they will release the patch when it is available rather than sitting on it for an undetermined period of time just to be dicks about it...
Re:What does that even mean? (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, it makes zero sense.
Broadcom, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to redefine the term "zero day".
"Broadcom defines a zero-day security patch as a patch or workaround for Critical Severity Security Alerts with a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score greater than or equal to 9.0."
https://knowledge.broadcom.com... [broadcom.com]
So for Broadcom, zero day just means "really bad".
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wow, that's even dumber than Imagined. If they mean critical vulnerabilities, why not just say that. You'd still have people asking 'critical by what definition' but then you could point to CVSS, a widely accepted framework/standard, and I think most would go 'ok'.
but to just redefine zero-day, to mean something completely different that has nothing to do with time, is just mind-blowing level stupid..
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security patches, save for zero-day security patches
I don't even know what 0-day patch is, I understand what 0-day vulnerability is.
Do they mean you can use patches for vulnerabilities that were disclosed before your support contract ended but the patch was issued after?
Makes not sense
0 Day patches are common in the gaming world. It came from the time where a lot of games were still shipped on discs so the gold version was stamped out a few months in advance of release, deliberately known to be buggy in the hope that the few months of delay is enough time to make a working patch that could be available on release day.
Now days with online distribution being common, games are still released buggy, but there are no 0 day patches available.
Corporate Extortion (Score:2)
That's a great ad for Proxmox (Score:2)
RIP VMware.
Re: That's a great ad for Proxmox (Score:2)
The ship is upside down and sinking (Score:2)
Yet her screws still turn pulling in fleeing life boats and mincing them to bits as screams and shrieks of terror fill the air.
The Old Honeypot Trick (Score:2)
1) Rollback
or 2) Become a fleeced subscriber along with the other sheep.
Which is brilliantly underhanded.
Is the rollback even realistically feasible?
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More like "the old Promissory Estoppel trick." Broadcom neesd to fire their entire legal department and the HR people who failed to screen them at hiring time.
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Sounds like VMWare allowed customers with expired contracts to continue downloading updates
I believe the confusion is about what the Support contracts added.
VMware's policy and the way the product was advertised to customers purchasing the product was always that you purchase whole major versions of the product, and SnS subscription is only mandatory per license for 1 year. Your purchase of a major version includes all updates to that product version until the end of general support date for that major re
Reminds me of SCO (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Reminds me of SCO (Score:2)
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SCO? Sounds like a company in similar business to Oracle. Heard of them? Because they are still around. There's no guarantee that this move will kill Broadcom. ... unfortunately. We have evidence of shittier companies doing equally shitty things and thriving.
Sell it already (Score:2)
Broadcom massively overpaid and the dictate from high up is "make line go up so I don't have to admit I'm an idiot". That's all this is about, some executives trying to delay the losses, till after they can run to another company to fuck up.
Just write it down and take the loss now, while vmware is still worth something. Broadcom is poison now, simply writing it down and delivering good service is no longer an option, they need to sell it at a massive loss. Still a smaller loss than running it into the groun
They just created a perfect biz oppy (Score:2)
They're not the only VM solutions around (Score:2)
If Broadcom are going to be dicks to their paying customers, maybe it's time for those customers to become someone else's. It's not like there aren't a multitude of ways to host VMs. And while some VMs are critical instances, I bet a lot more aren't - ephemeral and disposable VMs - gitlab runners and whatnot. Maybe it's time for companies to take stock of why they bother using VMware at all if the company is going to be assholes. Best way to avoid surprise audits and nasty surprises is to dump the product e
Sigh. (Score:2)
Way to Oracle your way out of millions of businesses, Broadcom.
I really do hope they poke the wrong bear (Score:2)
I really do hope they poke the wrong bear and it gets challenged in court.
Not sure why they can change the terms on their own without any recourse by the customers. Curious how this plays out in different legal jurisdictions.
Avago at work, not Broadcom. (Score:3)
Avago specialised in acquiring chip companies with cash cow businesses.
When they acquired Broadcom, they took on that name. But the business model has not changed.
Extortion (Score:1)
Good companies with good leaders... (Score:2)
increase profits by [1] reaching new consumers, or [2] producing newer desireable products at consumer-friendly prices, or [3] producing new-and-improved versions of their products or services so that consumers will CHOOSE to upgrade.
Bad companies with visionless hack leaders, or companies that are effective monopolies, need to find ways to squeeze more cash out of their existing customer base. THIS is where the drive to convert consumers from a perpetual software license model to a software-as-service subs