Does anyone have any insight into this, & what latest is going on at VMWare after the acquisition? Is this a good thing for Fusion/Workstation users, or just the first step on a long road of gradual decay toward an eventual unsupported dusty death?
My suspicion is that Broadcom is winding down these products but have to maintain them for at least a few years yet due to existing support contracts. Someone in middle management thought it would improve the company’s image a little bit to release these for “free” while they are still supported.
(The company I work for has a lot of vSphere, which was already eye-wateringly expensive before VMware was purchased by private equity. Earlier this year when it came time to renew the support contracts, they literally tripled the price. Our company said, “no thanks,” and we are now running thousands of vSphere hosts and a bunch of vCenters with zero support while whole teams scramble to transition our services to a mix of OpenStack and Kubernetes.
I’m not a heavy user of either product but Broadcom previously added some kind of non-commercial license for both that was useful for me for playing with retro operating systems and checking/improving various FreeBSD emulated device drivers. From the casual perspective it seems like they are still working on both and it doesn’t seem like either were the main focus of VMWare before the acquisition so no perceptible change in terms of quality (which is merely acceptable).
It’s a little crazy this didn’t happen a long time ago, under VMWare, to try and keep some level of relevance to the underlying hypervisor and device model. People seem to think Broadcom is the only greedy company but VMWare was always a very greedy company.
I’ve been (a little begrudgingly) paying to re-up my VMware license occasionally because I’ve found it just does better for virtualizing desktop OSes over VirtualBox. I’ve had a very good experience with the virtual GPU over anything I could figure out how to do with OSS offerings— short of doing full PCI passthrough. I even ended up using a Linux VM in a Windows host via VMware as my daily driver for a while, and it felt basically on par with running Linux natively! (In some ways it was better, as I didn’t have to deal with the pain of Nvidia’s drivers— no idea how much less painful it is these days)
Since then, WSL has mostly filled the niche for me, but I still turn to VMware if I want a local VM for whatever reason (it comes up occasionally for me)
That was my guess as well. Even prior to Broadcom, the development pace of both (especially workstation, which is what I was using most) seemed to have slowed to the point that it’s have been hard to believe they saw much revenue potential there. And with Apple Silicon, Fusion seemed to move from a common tool (that I’d buy with every mac I purchased/approved) to a really niche thing.
It’s easy to imagine it’s a better promotion for datacenter products than standalone moneymaker, especially once you factor in a company that’s not equipped for it needing to open a channel for consumer sales.
Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has announced his intention to divest VMware’s end-user computing and Carbon Black units, and signalled a rapid shift to subscription licenses of bigger software bundles.
Speaking on Broadcom’s Q4 2023 earnings call, Tan told investors “We are now refocusing VMware on its core business of creating private and hybrid cloud environments among large enterprises globally and divesting non-core assets.”
We’re actively investing in new features, usability improvements, and other valuable enhancements.
How are they going to do that if the product generates no income? This product is dead, they just haven’t got the balls to take it out back and shoot it.
I don’t know but they’ve collected from me personally over the years for both Workstation and Fusion (I didn’t renew after VMW 15.x and Fusion 11.x because my interests/focus changed and I didn’t use it as often). It’s better/less hassle than the alternatives.
What I suspect is they’re offering it as a free taste to entice people to use the Enterprise editions and will slowly lock features (GPU pass-through?) behind a support contract.
Does anyone have any insight into this, & what latest is going on at VMWare after the acquisition? Is this a good thing for Fusion/Workstation users, or just the first step on a long road of gradual decay toward an eventual unsupported dusty death?
My suspicion is that Broadcom is winding down these products but have to maintain them for at least a few years yet due to existing support contracts. Someone in middle management thought it would improve the company’s image a little bit to release these for “free” while they are still supported.
(The company I work for has a lot of vSphere, which was already eye-wateringly expensive before VMware was purchased by private equity. Earlier this year when it came time to renew the support contracts, they literally tripled the price. Our company said, “no thanks,” and we are now running thousands of vSphere hosts and a bunch of vCenters with zero support while whole teams scramble to transition our services to a mix of OpenStack and Kubernetes.
“May you live in interesting times.”
I don’t know. Could be @icefox’s Tenth Law.
Oooh, what’s that?
https://lobste.rs/s/u3t4sg/xmpp_forgotten_gem_instant_messaging#c_rawvsq has it as
“@icefox’s Tenth Law: Never attribute to anything else what can be explained by embrace-extend-extinguish.”
https://lobste.rs/s/u3t4sg/xmpp_forgotten_gem_instant_messaging#c_rawvsq
It’s something I named in this other thread:
https://lobste.rs/s/4ll6vo/vmware_fusion_workstation_now_free_for#c_zfwmi4
(I may have been wrong about it that time.)
I’m not a heavy user of either product but Broadcom previously added some kind of non-commercial license for both that was useful for me for playing with retro operating systems and checking/improving various FreeBSD emulated device drivers. From the casual perspective it seems like they are still working on both and it doesn’t seem like either were the main focus of VMWare before the acquisition so no perceptible change in terms of quality (which is merely acceptable).
It’s a little crazy this didn’t happen a long time ago, under VMWare, to try and keep some level of relevance to the underlying hypervisor and device model. People seem to think Broadcom is the only greedy company but VMWare was always a very greedy company.
Glad to see this!
I’ve been (a little begrudgingly) paying to re-up my VMware license occasionally because I’ve found it just does better for virtualizing desktop OSes over VirtualBox. I’ve had a very good experience with the virtual GPU over anything I could figure out how to do with OSS offerings— short of doing full PCI passthrough. I even ended up using a Linux VM in a Windows host via VMware as my daily driver for a while, and it felt basically on par with running Linux natively! (In some ways it was better, as I didn’t have to deal with the pain of Nvidia’s drivers— no idea how much less painful it is these days)
Since then, WSL has mostly filled the niche for me, but I still turn to VMware if I want a local VM for whatever reason (it comes up occasionally for me)
I would bet $100 that this is because adding a consumer checkout to the Broadcom website isn’t worth the revenue of these products.
When they bought VMWare they pushed all “consumer” purchases (i.e. Fusion) through resellers. I did it once, and it was a fucking nightmare to use.
That was my guess as well. Even prior to Broadcom, the development pace of both (especially workstation, which is what I was using most) seemed to have slowed to the point that it’s have been hard to believe they saw much revenue potential there. And with Apple Silicon, Fusion seemed to move from a common tool (that I’d buy with every mac I purchased/approved) to a really niche thing.
It’s easy to imagine it’s a better promotion for datacenter products than standalone moneymaker, especially once you factor in a company that’s not equipped for it needing to open a channel for consumer sales.
The “future investment” part seems to fly in the face of what the CEO said 11 months ago: https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/07/broadcom_q4_2023/
Note that you must have a Broadcom customer account in order to download this. There’s no direct download link that I could find.
The macOS/Linux download URLs can be found here:)
https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/blob/5ed183027f71e684e73538995160bc724ab42ff4/Casks/v/vmware-fusion.rb#L5 https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=vmware-workstation&id=140ce4d9cbffc2044cdf2c1008f5d8f4987fd613#n63
Windows? 🤷
How are they going to do that if the product generates no income? This product is dead, they just haven’t got the balls to take it out back and shoot it.
I don’t know but they’ve collected from me personally over the years for both Workstation and Fusion (I didn’t renew after VMW 15.x and Fusion 11.x because my interests/focus changed and I didn’t use it as often). It’s better/less hassle than the alternatives.
What I suspect is they’re offering it as a free taste to entice people to use the Enterprise editions and will slowly lock features (GPU pass-through?) behind a support contract.