I have talked with several. They were like: Yeah we expect a significant price increase, but our customers will pay that. In oil and gas sector: We can afford that!

We are too (major enterprise). It's a shame. It was a good product. They don't even seem to be interested in sustaining it. Just trying to extract maximum value as quickly as possible before they kill it.

Dumb or not, getting rid of their smaller customers and jacking up prices for their large customers is exactly what Broadcom said their strategy was going to be immediately after they bought VMware. They are in the execution stage now, it shouldn't come as news to anyone at this point.

Extract as much value as you can from a quickly depreciating asset before you dump it.

Makes so much money.

It’s a shame that VMware allowed this to happen. Yes, it’s just business, but talk about not giving a fuck about who acquired them and what was going to happen to their product.

Broadcom follows the private equity playbook: hike prices and reduce expenses. Customers will leave until only the most locked in remain. This extracts value from the business and makes it more capital efficient. Broadcom will continue to extract value until only a husk remains.

At 300% or 1000% rates you might make more in a few years it takes customer to move than you spend on acquisition. At that point, well you are still getting paid or you roll it out to someone else again and still recover part of cost if tech is still good enough.

Squeeze as much money from the customers until their pain is big enough and they migrate away from VMware.

> Open source software with permissive licensing is the only true guarantee of not getting squeezed.

I may be misinterpreting here, so please do correct me.

Does the permissiveness of the license matter more than the utility of the tool? Whether or not an application/platform is using a permissive or copyleft license shouldn't really be a determining factor here for viability or vendor escape.

> But you can’t always find suitable FOSS etc.

This is the most prevalent problem, it's a lot easier to just spend money for a working tool than use an open source project that doesn't have everything you need, causes papercuts, and is being worked on in the developers' spare time.

However, a lot of FOSS options would be much better off if consumers did contribute to the project. Code is great, but financial support to the core developers goes much, much farther. Particularly if it enables them to prioritize the project over other things in life.

KVM is fine. Virsh or virt-manager to manage it. No issues with compiling kernel modules either.

I wouldn't look at virtualbox. It's a good product but oracle is just as bad a company as broadcom.

For work we're looking at proxmox (https://www.proxmox.com/en/).

Linux to windows on a single (or a handful of) host? Why not just libvirt (KVM and qemu) then?

Out of curiosity, what specifically does VMware Workstation enable you to do, that Virtualbox doesn't?

KVM works fine for my admittedly limited needs.

Virtualbox or QEMU+KVM

Depends on what you need exactly

That is by design?Bell was broken up by the government. It didn’t become what it is today without that intervention.

The anti trust policies till the early 80s and seeing a revival currently with Lina khan and the FTC is not to have monopolistic companies.

Bell labs could be funded because of the monopoly of Ma bell . Larger organizations do not efficiently use capital to really innovate.

Bell labs was really great for research, but Ma bell wasn’t all that successful bringing that research as products to market . Same reason why Google couldn’t get GPTs to market like OpenAI could or GM couldn’t make an electric car successful like Tesla did or SpaceX innovating better than ULA, Boeing et al.

We ideally want companies to grow and die, not become rent seeking models that occasionally throw some scraps for research or CSR activities while returning bulk of the value extracted to shareholders without innovating on their products

AT&T probably have quite a lot of broadcom hardware in their own network. Besides, we really do not want that kind of thing happening as a precedent because it destroys the market.

Most companies don't try to operate like Automattic for good reason.

How is making random customers switch because you slowed down their internet speeds anything but a self-own?

People don't buy devices because they work with AT&T, they buy AT&T to get internet on their device.

Customer: my internet is slow!

AR&T Service Rep: Ah, That’s because your computer has a Broadcom chip in it.

Customer: How is that possible? I don’t even eat chips!

Yeah great idea.

vSphere is, by far, the most mature enterprise datacenter virtualization platform which is why this is so challenging. Orgs are going to have to make do with openShift or Hyper-V etc and a lot of functionality will be lost along the way.