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Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

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Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#11

Post by chii »

dijit wrote: post #4
RockRobotRock wrote: post #3

You can find working vSphere keygens on some sketchy site. I encourage anyone in a tough spot to use one. You paid for the product, fuck them.

I have long since believed this to be legal, though I'd like to understand if it is. Effectively: Software mechanisms are not the litmus of legality, as if you buy a working key, it may not be legal to use since there are country restrictions. So I would surmise the opposite stance: if you have a license sitting on a shelf and you "assign" it to a system; using a keygen at that point is fine, since you do own a licen…

> but one or the other must be true.

they are neither mutually exclusive, nor even related.

You have a key that opens a door to a house you dont own. Do you have permission, just because you got a key, to go in?

You lost a key to a house you have already been given permission to go in. You found out that there's actually a master key that you can get in the black market, which you buy to open that door to go into the house.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#12

Post by chii »

cesarb wrote: post #7
azalemeth wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly that's the sad story behind drm in a nutshell. Pirates get a better product.

> Pirates get a better product. Your comment reminded me of this classic article: https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/ "If I choose open source, I don't have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing." That is, it's not just pirates who get a better product; open source users get a better product too. (Going back to the context of this thread: those who chose an open sou…

So the issue of open source becomes : who creates the open source product in the first place?

The fact that open source exists today is because there are charitable people out there that are contributing it for free (or effectively free). Some business models employ open source as a marketing strategy for their paid parts, which is inevitably what you really would need (and thus have the "licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing" problem).

In the end, the pirate's product is free because they can make it free for way less effort, at the cost of the original creator of that software. While it's arguable that the piratee does not really do harm, as they wouldn't have paid for said software anyway, it is the original creator of the software that borne the cost of its creation.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#13

Post by jasonjayr »

dijit wrote: post #4
RockRobotRock wrote: post #3

You can find working vSphere keygens on some sketchy site. I encourage anyone in a tough spot to use one. You paid for the product, fuck them.

I have long since believed this to be legal, though I'd like to understand if it is. Effectively: Software mechanisms are not the litmus of legality, as if you buy a working key, it may not be legal to use since there are country restrictions. So I would surmise the opposite stance: if you have a license sitting on a shelf and you "assign" it to a system; using a keygen at that point is fine, since you do own a licen…

I have heard/read that should be audited by Microsoft or any of the other large software houses that do that, they don't care for any certificate of authenticity or license keys, or anything.

They want to see a valid purchase order for the SKU of the license.

So, I think using a keygen might raise some red flags if the auditing software reports back the key even if it's the same SKU you paid for (and it had better be) but the proof of a paid order is what determines if you are licensed.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#14

Post by dijit »

chii wrote: post #11
dijit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have long since believed this to be legal, though I'd like to understand if it is. Effectively: Software mechanisms are not the litmus of legality, as if you buy a working key, it may not be legal to use since there are country restrictions. So I would surmise the opposite stance: if you have a license sitting on a shelf and you "assign" it to a system; using a keygen at that point is fine, since you do own a licen…

> but one or the other must be true. they are neither mutually exclusive, nor even related. You have a key that opens a door to a house you dont own. Do you have permission, just because you got a key, to go in? You lost a key to a house you have already been given permission to go in. You found out that there's actually a master key that you can get in the black market, which you buy to open that door to go into the…

Alternatively: I lost the key to my home (which is rented) and someone is able to fashion a functioning key.

That's actually legal.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#15

Post by sofixa »

It's embarrassing how poorly Broadcom have rushed into throwing the baby out with the bathwater for no reason. They could have taken a slower approach instead of doing everything as soon as the deal officially closed...

I hope they lose as much business as possible over this, everyone should be looking into alternatives because they're such a shitshow.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#16

Post by chris_wot »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #10
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #2

I do recall several HN commenters called it back them when it was announced Broadcom would take over and cause a shit show.

Not much of shit show, but the speculation back then what that BRCM will split VMware into pieces, keep the most profitable parts and milk them as much as possible. So far two things happened: - a lot of people were laid off - VMware will turn into a subscription service, no more perpetual licenses on which you can bolt a support contract for updates.

So… what are the alternatives?

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#17

Post by mvdwoord »

chris_wot wrote: post #16
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much of shit show, but the speculation back then what that BRCM will split VMware into pieces, keep the most profitable parts and milk them as much as possible. So far two things happened: - a lot of people were laid off - VMware will turn into a subscription service, no more perpetual licenses on which you can bolt a support contract for updates.

So… what are the alternatives?

The million (billion?) dollar question... problem is for a lot of large companies to do any sort of upgrade is already a long enough process. Moving everything to a different/new stack is simply not feasible in a short time frame. Add to this the issues with regulators (need to run on supported sw), especially at places like banks, it will be a bumpy ride I think.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#18

Post by EvanAnderson »

jasonjayr wrote: post #13
dijit wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have long since believed this to be legal, though I'd like to understand if it is. Effectively: Software mechanisms are not the litmus of legality, as if you buy a working key, it may not be legal to use since there are country restrictions. So I would surmise the opposite stance: if you have a license sitting on a shelf and you "assign" it to a system; using a keygen at that point is fine, since you do own a licen…

I have heard/read that should be audited by Microsoft or any of the other large software houses that do that, they don't care for any certificate of authenticity or license keys, or anything. They want to see a valid purchase order for the SKU of the license. So, I think using a keygen might raise some red flags if the auditing software reports back the key even if it's the same SKU you paid for (and it had better be…

I've experienced multiple MSFT compliance audits at small business Customers in the 2004-2020 timeframe. MSFT only ever cared about reconciling what was in use with what was paid-for. I've been asked for photos of OEM key stickers attached to hardware but never asked to retrieve keys from installed software.

I assume keys are another facet of keeping specific details around licenses vague enough that there's always room for MSFT to argue or bargain.

Re: Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover

#19

Post by linsomniac »

chris_wot wrote: post #16
ExoticPearTree wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much of shit show, but the speculation back then what that BRCM will split VMware into pieces, keep the most profitable parts and milk them as much as possible. So far two things happened: - a lot of people were laid off - VMware will turn into a subscription service, no more perpetual licenses on which you can bolt a support contract for updates.

So… what are the alternatives?

We use ganeti and I'm ridiculously happy with it.

When I came on board we were using ganeti for dev/stg and VMWare for production. But the difficulty of monitoring VMWare (we were moving away from SAN to local storage, and doing a RAID array monitor was a PITA) and administering (via Windows GUI, which I had to run via a VM on my Linux workstations), plus the licensing weirdness (clusters of size 5 were a sweet spot, any more shifted the price dramatically).

So I eventually shifted our production to ganeti as well, because it had been so solid in dev/stg. It's all manageable from the Linux CLI, and it works really, really well. It's basically a management layer on top of kvm+qemu+drbd+ceph. https://ganeti.org/

The other popular option, which I ran in my previous work, is Proxmox. It is probably a more comfortable analog to VMWare users. https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-virtual-environment/overv...

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