• anamethatisnt@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Some alternatives:

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Along with the termination of perpetual licensing

    Just so? Termination of a perpetual licence?

    • wmassingham@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Yes. A perpetual license just means no fixed end date, not that it’s irrevocable or interminable.

      You can probably get away with continuing to use ESXi free licenses even commercially, you just won’t have support. And at home, nothing is going to stop existing versions from working.

      Incidentally, assuming I found the right license agreement: https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/downloads/eula/universal_eula.pdf

      It doesn’t actually say it’s perpetual. It only says “The term of this EULA begins on Delivery of the Software and continues until this EULA is terminated in accordance with this Section 9”, but that section only covers termination for cause or insolvency, there is no provision for termination at VMware’s discretion. So, while I’m not a lawyer, it definitely sounds like you can continue using ESXi free.

      Actually, reading further, I think the applicable license is this one: https://www.vmware.com/vmware-general-terms.html

      But that one has even less language about license term and termination. Although it does define “perpetual license” as “a license to the Software with a perpetual term”, again not irrevocable or interminable.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      Yeah I’d love to know how you can revoke a perpetual license without changing versions or anything around it.

      • toofpic@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        You don’t have a contract signed with them, don’t you?
        ELI5: Your neighbor has a pool. He allows you to swim there, “any day you want”. Then he is off his meds and he stops letting you in. Can you sue him because you had some rights to swim in his pool before?

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The free cut of ESXi was only able to run on limited number of cores, addressed a modest quantity of memory, and lacked many management niceties.

    Justin Warren, the principal analyst of consultancy Pivot Nine, told The Register the demise of free vSphere means "Broadcom has pretty clearly signaled that it is no longer interested in smaller VMware customers.

    Warren rated the change "another gift to competitors like Nutanix, Scale Computing, Microsoft with Hyper-V/Azure Stack, or Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization (via KubeVirt).

    Pre-acquisition VMware proudly touted the 4,000-plus small clouds that ran its stack, and applauded their ability to offer services that hyperscalers could not – especially providing sovereign clouds that lacked the complex legal entanglements that see multinational hyperscalers sometimes beholden to laws of their home jurisdictions.

    Meanwhile, the implications of Broadcom’s decision to end perpetual licenses for VMware products continue to be analyzed by users.

    One VMware consultant of The Register’s acquaintance told us the change means some workloads now appear to be cheaper to run on bare metal than under vSphere.


    The original article contains 575 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!