Broadcom has once again proven they are the undisputed masters of enshittification. In this video, we break down Broadcom’s latest move: sending cease and desist letters to former VMware customers who are no longer paying for support.
Funny, they prevented people from getting downloads of any kind if they no longer have an active account. You need to have a “token” to get updates now, and this locks me (a licensed user) from getting those downloads! I have a VMUG Advantage account and bought the licenses that are part of that in October, just before the rug pull. So they certainly are bold to be claiming these people are downloading stuff without license when they are blocking all VMUG Advantage licensees from their licensed products (breach of contract)!
If you aren’t certified, you are just more the the unwashed masses of trash to Broadcom. I was slightly more polite in the monthly VMUG Townhall this morning, others were less polite.
It’s sad to see the VMware representatives on these webcalls when they get pressed on the situation, it’s clear they do not agree with the plan, but they still need to toe the line.
All of these calls are “very positive”, but the one I had with my employer’s group (yes we had to form a group to get the pricing lower) were pretty frank about not liking this, but there are also some free openings for big enough corporate customers. We are pretty decent sized when you add in all the cores across the entire group.
On the corporate side, we get free training for ondemand and a certain number of credits for live remote or if a big enough group of people get together, in person where we just need to pay the travel expenses.
This token thing is messed up though, and clearly a breach for lab users like myself. Not sure VMUG is going to be worth the money going forward, need to pass a cert or two to see what I really get from Broadcom.
“Broadcom, where good software goes to slowly die”. Yeah, still a bit salty. Still working toward certification because my area is so deep in the system, and working towards educating those around me that there are good choices, learn and deploy. Is you don’t want to learn and deploy, there are companies that will do this on contract.
And I will add that through the lower level course that I’ve almost completed, if you buy a high enough level of product, there are some cool features present. But 75+% of those are just in the base XCP-ng with the from sources XO.
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