After Broadcom acquired VMware, there’s been a steady stream of worrying or outright bad news for people using VMware products at home, for personal use, as enthusiasts. The biggest blow to the enthusiast market was the end of perpetual licensing, forcing people into subscriptions instead. Finally, though it seems we’re getting some good news.
The most exciting part is that Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro will now have two license models. We now provide a Free Personal Use or a Paid Commercial Use subscription for our Pro apps. Users will decide based on their use case whether a commercial subscription is required.
This means that everyday users who want a virtual lab on their Mac, Windows or Linux computer can do so for free simply by registering and downloading the bits from the new download portal located at support.broadcom.com.
↫ Michael Roy on the VMware blog
This is definitely good news for us enthusiasts, and it means I won’t have to buy a cheap VMware license off eBay every few years anymore, so I’m quite satisfied here. However, with VMware under Broadcom focusing more and more on the enterprise and squeezing every last penny out of those customers, one has to wonder if this ‘free for personal use’ is just a prelude to winding down the development of enthusiasts’ tools altogether.
It wouldn’t be the first time that a product going free for personal use was a harbinger of worse things yet to come.
Desperate times calling for desperate measures…
I do not like Broadcom but this seems like a smart consolidation. They need the commercial workstation stuff as part of their ecosystem. This allows them to address the non-commercial for free. I am sure they are hoping to be a preferred platform for professionals that will go on to choose and recommend enterprise product. With this move, they have completely eliminated almost all costs of doing so including engineering, order management, and support. They have eliminated per-incident support so you either have a commercial license or you are posting on the forums. Even the marketing is now identical. Allowing people to download software they are making anyway costs them nothing. The only business they are “losing” here is business they do not want. As a bonus, it makes things a bit harder for potential competitors.
This also gets rid of all the $10 product key noise that probably devalues their offering. You now clearly have a subscription or you do not.
In my view, this is a really smart move ( from a Product Management perspective ).
It’s not like they have a choice the entire industry picked up and started moving to alternatives…. the strategy VmWare was using was very similar to Nvidia’s you hold the mindshare you hold all the power. VmWare WAS the name in hypervisors.
Now…. that heavy duty mind share has taken a hit.
cb88,
I’m sure broadcom executives thought they didn’t care about unprofitable users, but then someone/something clued them into the fact that basic users using vmware actually help starve their competitors of oxygen.
Even though we’re not talking about vmware piracy per say, this Bill Gates quote fits here…
The best way for Broadcom to protect their investment is to keep vmware relevant for the masses. Sending users away, even though they aren’t profitable, 100% guaranties they will crown a new leader in a couple of years.
Giving Fusion a spin on my M1 Mac Studio, curiously it kept getting an error when trying to download Windows 11 Enterprise but 11 Pro is downloading just fine. I’ll follow up once I’ve had a chance to try it out and compare it to my previous experience with Parallels on M series Macs.
Morgan,
If you do check it, it would be interesting to test if it phones home to the mothership or otherwise restricts your usage after some future date. I don’t know if I’d trust broadcom to not have some kind of kill switch.
I did play with a bit last night and so far, from a performance point, Parallels is a bit better. Parallels also has a simpler and easier interface, though Fusion isn’t too bad either. That said, for a now free product its performance is good enough for everyday use when you just absolutely must have Windows. I’m tempted to bring my Mac to work and see how it performs running the now 64-bit native Quickbooks Enterprise Desktop under Wintel translated on Windows-on-ARM virtualized on M1 macOS. That’s the only software keeping us on Wintel at work, and it will soon go away in favor of their Quickbooks Online version (once they can figure out how to reliably host our huge 25+ year old databases).
I tried a little gaming and there is noticeable lag, though it doesn’t make things unplayable. Parallels also seems better in this area. I tried WotLK era World of Warcraft on a private server (the OS X native WotLK client doesn’t run on M1 Macs even through Rosetta 2, nor on Intel Macs with Catalina or higher) and it was more or less locked at 60fps at 2560×1440 resolution. Curiously, even though my monitor can go up to 170Hz at that resolution, I couldn’t get the game to come out of locked 60fps. It’s a 17 year old game at this point though, so that’s probably why.
I haven’t looked for any phoning home, I suppose I should install Little Snitch and report back on that front. I doubt they would make such a big deal about this being a free license only to rug pull later, but it’s Broadcom so you never know. As for phoning home altogether, I’m sure it does report some sort of metrics to justify releasing it for free. Oh well, if they want to watch my night elf hunter running around the Badlands in skimpy armor, I guess that’s fine with me. 🙂
Morgan,
Well, to clarify, it wasn’t strictly about broadcom pulling the rug on the free version, but having forced upgrades down the line that free users cannot opt out of because the current software will stop working. For example, X-lite voip software did this. Features that were part of the old free version got striped away in later free versions. Since the old version incorporated a kill switch, free users were loosing features over time after upgrading. Incidentally X-lite appears to have been sold to a new company and they replaced the free version with a trial version.
In any case though phoning home could mean there’s a kill switch and/or spyware. Of course I’m not a fan of either, but sometimes when you use proprietary software it comes with the territory.
I would really be on board with this move, however…
It does not seem to work. Not it alleviates my general issues with them dropping older licenses.
First, you can no longer buy a perpetual license to vmware (fusion/workstation) pro.
If you are a business user, you would be locked into to a “perpetual” subscription.
Second, their webapage just does not work. Had to migrate to a broadcom account, which seemed fair. Reset the password after a lengthy sequence, and landed on the download page, accepted terms, and then went into a loop for address verification. After several tries, gave up and wanted to use customer service, and that chat eventually led to:
Apparently they wanted to hide the bad news (no perpetual license) under the good news. But even then they failed to actually deliver a download of the software.
Just FYI, I had the address verification loop too. I turned off uBlock Origin and it went through. So I guess there’s a tracker uBlock (or whatever ad blocker you use) is picking up and canceling out?
Morgan,
Thanks! That fixed it.
Well, for that (small?) portion of professional developers that use Workstation, they actually raised the price from US$ 199 (perpetual, or every few years) to US$ 120 a year (every year). The tone of the press release suggests that they are not likely to pursue possibile violations (using a personal license for work) but that in turn leaves a bit of uncertainty regarding the future of the product.
They probably have realized not many home users were paying for pro anyway. They were either using the base version, or to be honest a “cracked” one.
But yes, there is an upside to abandoning perpetual licenses and forcing those who pay to pay every year, again and again (with no promise not to raise prices in the future either).