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VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

blogs.vmware.com

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Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#2

Post by ganoushoreilly »

I've mixed feelings on this. One side I love it's free, the annual pricing seems reasonable to what it was. On the other, i've been so burned by their pricing for everything else with clients that i'm reticent to be thankful.

I suppose it's a step in the right direction, bringing back ESXI for homelab users would be a good step too.

Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#3

Post by mickelsen »

Given that this is owned Broadcom now, and they are going all in with squeezing every last drop from ESXi and similar offerings, I wonder what's gonna happen with Fusion in the future; while now you only pay for commercial usage, maybe they are going to let it rot over the years until it's no longer cutting edge software? Would they keep it as a loss-leader?

Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#8

Post by bombcar »

Shank wrote: post #5

I'm surprised they're making Workstation and Fusion free, given that they killed off the free ESXi/vSphere hypervisor. Seems strange?

I suspect they knew (and to be fair, probably correct) that a decent number of small businesses (and maybe even larger ones) were using ESXi and they just decided to shut that down in a push to get more licenses.

If my theory is correct, in about two years (if they haven't killed it entirely by the) they'll introduce a "free for homelab use" variant - maybe.

But Workstation and Fusion were more used by personal people and as a support tool FOR professionals, so they needed to keep those going, but charging $79 for it just wasn't worth the hassle. Notice they're not even selling ANY licenses directly anymore; you have to go through someone else. VMWare sold directly.

Re: VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

#10

Post by AshamedCaptain »

mickelsen wrote: post #3

Given that this is owned Broadcom now, and they are going all in with squeezing every last drop from ESXi and similar offerings, I wonder what's gonna happen with Fusion in the future; while now you only pay for commercial usage, maybe they are going to let it rot over the years until it's no longer cutting edge software? Would they keep it as a loss-leader?

Workstation was already rotting for all intents and purposes. Likely Fusion was also rotting since the switch to ARM but never tried it.

The entire space ("desktop virtualization") is dead. Even VirtualBox which I praised a year ago seems to be slowing down.

This likely just poisons the well for a market they had all but abandoned.

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