Relevant bits from the article:
Broadcom has blinked, and made a couple of changes to support VMware customers who don’t want to move to its new software bundle subscriptions.
Customers also told Tan that “fast-moving change may require more time, so we have given support extensions to many customers who came up for renewal while these changes were rolling out.”
The other change is providing some ongoing security patches for VMware customers who persist with their perpetual licenses instead of shifting to Broadcom’s subs.
“We are announcing free access to zero-day security patches for supported versions of vSphere, and we’ll add other VMware products over time,” Tan wrote, describing the measure as aimed at ensuring that customers “whose maintenance and support contracts have expired and choose to not continue on one of our subscription offerings.” The change means such customers “are able to use perpetual licenses in a safe and secure fashion.”
So, tiny win if you’re already on a perpetual license though I don’t think the subscription enshittification train has reversed course.
I’d sue them if I had the perpetual license. Their only options should be to go out of business, support the product in the way it was promised and purchased, or buy the licenses back for the same cost as 20 years of their subscription product would cost (which is dirt cheap compared to perpetual).
Honestly, unless they have some kind of concrete guarantees sufficient to ensure that a customer is happy (like service providers with N% uptime guarantees), I think that trying to force someone to support something that they don’t want to support is a dead end. There’s too much wiggle room in what they need to do.
What are the alternatives for people in this enviornment?
I use qemu when I virtualize things. I assume that there’s some company out there that provides commercial support for it and tools for deploying and managing tons of VMs.
Proxmox. Microsoft has Hyper-V and Windows Storage. Oracle has VirtualBox but lol no. There’s also OpenStack that has a whole bunch of stuff to it, and of course you could just orchestrate Debian with Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, etc.
EDIT: Oh and I almost forgot Citrix
Then they shouldn’t have promised to, or bought a company that had made such a promise.
Alternatives would be Nutanix, Xen, CloudStack, Hyper-V, Proxmox, and moving more quickly to containers.
I don’t think perpetual licenses ever included perpetual support.
So it was a scam from the start?
I don’t see how that would be a scam. They sold you a license, that gives you an entitlement to use the software, not the service for someone to help you use it, or future versions.
Correct. Most corporate software I deal with separates the two. They may throw a free year in of premium support or something in on initial purchase, but making them separate allows them to offer varying levels for customers to choose from. I.e. no support, email only, 48hr SLA, 12hr SLA and 1hr SLA. As different tiers and prices on yearly contracts or even per instance in some cases.