VMware sues Siemens for allegedly using unlicensed software VMware has sued industrial giant AG Siemens’s US operations for alleged use of unlicensed software and accused it of changing its story during negotiations. The case was filed last Friday in the US District Court for the District Delaware. VMware’s complaint [PDF] alleges that Siemens AG’s US operations used more VMware …
you'll only pi$$ off your customers once, and as BroadcoN own lots of brands you'll pi$$ your customers off for all of them! We won't touch ANY boradcoN products with a very long pole. Thankfully just complete our migration from VMWare to Nutanix last week. Bye, bye BroadCon bye, bye
I don't understand the new download token either. You have to be logged in to get the token, so that its linked to your account. But you have to be logged in now anyway to download the software too, so its also already linked to your account. And well, when you log in it says what you have downloaded in the past, so they do keep track already. So what exactly does the new token based approach do, apart from make it even more (the interface compared to what vmware used to have before going broadcom) of a crappy experience?
Its the same for downloading firmware for Brocade switches, you have to request the download, which takes time and they can reject, even if you have a contract.
Siemens has licences on every bit of software. Part of the job of a Siemens engineer was putting in all the long numbers to get.some of your own measured data in siemens scada like tool.
Most fun is microsoft latest products have online activation only. Very funny for systems that don't have en internet connection..
The competition is 10 years ahead, as it at least doesn't make your business a subsidiary of VMware or Unity or Oracle or Adobe (pray they don't increase the dividend too much the next "license" price hike).
When it comes to virtualization, there is plenty of free software that is functionally better in every single way and also happens to be gratis (with the shocking tradeoff being that you need to have hired at least one competent person, who knows how to use computers, or you need to be competent yourself).
Even though it was a waste of time to do so for one VM, I set up libvirt on Gentoo and it only took a few hours.
The same is true for other kinds of software (although in certain situations, some workarounds are still required due to proprietary sabotage, but the sabotage is slowly but steadily being eliminated).
It's a funny old world. On one side we have developers rolling in cash from software that can't be used but must be paid for and on the other we have developers quitting because of software that's widely used by people who refuse to pay a thing.
Thats the problem with opensource, if its 'free' then why pay anything for it, and the expectation is to keep getting it for free without having to put anything back.
The other is, companies that use the software may not want to donate / be associated with the software that they use for free. So their options are not to pay them, or to go via a 3rd party (support agreements) and hope that they actually contribute to the development via commits or contributions.
With closed source, paid for software, the expectation of free was never their. and there is no free loading like you can do with opensource (outside of pirating / not reporting in usage), so people keep using it as prices increase, up to the point where it becomes to much and the work to migrate to the opensource alternative and likely 'freeloading' is seen as more cost effective.
"The other is, companies that use the software may not want to donate / be associated with the software that they use for free. So their options are not to pay them, or to go via a 3rd party (support agreements) and hope that they actually contribute to the development via commits or contributions."
A few examples:
There are a number of Linux distros for which you can buy support or buy as supported from their maintainers, from Red Hat ans Suse down to Zorin. No problem there.
LibreOffice you can buy commercial support from the project website.
PostgresSQL's main site lists companies from whom you can obtain commercial support. A simple search through their lists includes many who state that they are contributors to the project. Some individual contributors are named.
This does not deny that there are individual developers who are unpaid but this situation now seems to be receiving attention.
It's all far removed from paying for a subscription for support and wondering if that support is going to break you system on the second Tuesday of the month.
I take the view that hiring a developer of the FLOSS project to maintain it for our company is cheaper than paying for licences for closed source equivalent products.
We then get all the product support we need, and bug fixes far faster than any commercial support agreement. Not only that we get to train the rest of our staff in better use of each FLOSS package we use.
Hiring is now largely from "known" developers, who are already up to speed with 50% of the tasks that they are going to be given....
Sure we DON'T have members of staff contributing to every FLOSS package we use, but then we do pay wages for our team to implement features and fixes for stuff that doesn't affect us either. And most of the time our team already know who to ask and are willing to just get stuck in
I think that is a win for all of us...
/Rattus
> On one side we have developers rolling in cash from software that can't be used but must be paid for and on the other we have developers quitting because of software that's widely used by people who refuse to pay a thing.
That first lot of "developers" are companies, shareholders and management.
That second lot are actual developers, acting as individuals.
Not exactly comparable groups.
Not exactly comparable groups
They are in the sense that the software itself is produced by "actual developers" in both cases and is in many cases consumed by commercial organisations.
The difference in the first case is that the "actual developers" get paid for their efforts and have time off - and the customers will, perhaps through gritted teeth, submit to paying fees that they consider unreasonable.
In the second case, the "customers" seem reluctant to offer even a token contribution or even thanks to developers who are working often in their spare time.
The first model would seem to be doing more for the developers than the latter, even given the hefty cut going to shareholders and management. All I'm saying is that the money is clearly there - but we need to find better ways of channeling it towards individuals.
So as someone who has built a shadow career out of supporting charities on almost zero budgets, I’ve found that while free software is good, if you really want peace of mind it’s good to pay something so you are supporting the small business of the developers themselves.
I’ve looked at getting VMware Fusion for Mac but I’m faced with having to call sales, and also to wait for Apple to make 72-core processors (how about it Tim, you know you want to! I can see you waxing lyrical about it already!)
some licencing systems are so convoluted one might almost imagine they were designed to create non-compliances - is VMware one of those?
VMware is not too bad. Oracle are the pits. Their products & licensing schemes are designed to trip you up so you have to pay way more for licenses than you actually need to avoid an even bigger non-compliance fine.
If Oracle were more honest with their licensing Larry would have to sell a few yachts to prop up Oracle.
Sounds like a land grab gone wrong. Sounds like they had the ability to get extra licenses under their old agreement, so they made up a bunch of installations and tried to get them grandfathered in so that they didn't have to pay 3x the price for those licenses, then VMware has caught them out on the land grab and said "Hang on, where did these installs come from?"
It could be that Siemens bought their licenses through a third party supplier who became named as the owner of the licenses. Seen that a lot with Cisco licenses. So VMware checked their list and it doesn’t match what Siemens gave but almost certainly doesn’t match what Siemens bought through whoever did their commodities buying, who of course will change every few years because of best value, whatever that means.
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One of my past employers is now making the move from VMware to Nutanix, a few of my ex colleagues have already gotten a boot camp sort of introduction to migrating from Vmware by Nutanix, he said the migration will be easy, but standing up the Nutanix cluster next to the VMware estate, in the same location will be a challenge, proper power and rackspace will be the biggies...
we have just finished our VMWare to Nutanix migration, twas easy using the Nutanix Move tool but our setup wasn't that complex. We were migrating Network infrastructure from Cisco to Juniper at the same time so re-IP'd everything as we migrated. Our existing ESX environment was on Nutanix so we have just change hypervisor to AHV. The next step starting in a month or two is the migration of our native Azure VM's to Nutanix NC2 running in Azure that should save a lot of cash!
There's probably not a lot VMWare offers that you can't get elsewhere with appropriate effort, but I have to give it to them that provided you use hardware off the HCL and use their products in an approved manner it's pretty pain free - although my exploration of VMWare has been at a fairly low end. The issues I had with VMWare boiled down to trying to use hardware not on the HCL, and moving VMs between different free VMWare products - unsurprisingly they started making that more difficult as the years went on.
I've used other products too, right from bringing up Xen from bare metal, and KVM before it was nicely bundled, to some of the more turn key offerings, and whilst they've been good, I have to admit VMWare has overall been less hassle.
Personally I don't need quite as much an easy life to risk rapacious Broadcom licensing, but others may think differently. Staff time is not free, and if you're paying a company to migrate you, you're going to need to do due diligence to ensure they won't do a Broadcom themselves in a few years. Even if it's 'open source' that's hardly a get out of jail free card, with all the proprietary components companies sell on top, not to mention the usually lacklustre documentation.
Fortunately the work VMWare stuff I kept going on a shoestring finally got properly funded and moved to a resilient Cisco infrastructure, and then the whole business moved to Hyper-V. Apart from a few CPU resource issues in the early days, now it's pretty much pain free.
For all the complaints I have about work, they were smart enough to move away from VMWare, and unsurprisingly smart enough to be very diligent in removing all Java from the organisation lest Oracle's outrageous licensing apply.
It used to be once a month that we get some awkward news about Mr.Tan corporation, now it seems its weekly, almost bi-daily ...
And the next rumour is already in the wild and I'm not talking about VVF EOL coming ... Partners, are you going to be Reseller or Service Provider. Prepare to pick your side as doing both seems to be on EOL road... Till the next one!
One would have thought that VMWare was using license codes, node IDs, etc. It's not that hard to have software that won't install and / or run unless a license of some sort is granted to that machine by the vendor. Unless the user is engaging in some heavy weight hacking to circumvent such controls, it should be easy for the vendor to know what licenses it's issued to the user, and hard for the user to over-use the software they've got. And if it's connected to the Internet, it's not very difficult for the licensing aspects of software to call home to the vendor.
So, what's actually gone on here? Are they going round counting ESXi servers by hand?
Keep in mind that this is Broadcom's slant on what is going on, the actual facts may be different.
I've done business with Siemens US in the past. They have the attitude that because they are Siemens you will do what they say and you will like it. That included changing the terms of the contract after it had already been agreed upon and demanding that you accept it.
If would not surprise me if what happened in this case is that Broadcom presented an invoice for 'x' licenses for 'y' dollars, and someone in Siemens purchasing returned a signed version with the numbers changed tor 'x + 10%' licenses for 'y - 10%' dollars to see if Broadcom would swallow it. This is entirely in line with how companies like Siemens US do business.
Broadcom may have suffered a sense of humour failure and decided to "play hardball" as the Americans put it, launching a lawsuit over a technicality to show the other side just who is boss. I expect this to get settled out of court when one side or the other backs down.
Since Siemens US can't exactly suddenly rip out all their VMWare installations, it won't surprise me if Siemens are the ones to back down over this. The revision to the numbers suggests that this is exactly what is happening.
I imagine that a lot of big companies out there feel they have enough negotiating leverage with Broadcom due to their size that they won't be affected by Broadcom's new policies. They may find out that this isn't the case. If so, then I won't be surprised if a number of big companies start to bail out of VMWare in a few years time.
"Keep in mind that this is Broadcom's slant on what is going on, the actual facts may be different."
Indeed. I have no axe to grind with either company but I do recall Siemens receiving the largest (at the time) non-compliance fine.
https://www.ropesgray.com/-/media/files/publications/2008/12/siemens-agrees-to-pay-the-largest-fcpa-penalty-ever-imposed.pdf?
Historically at least vmware never had any kinds of checks to ensure anything was in use other than you had a valid key to install(at least for esxi+vcenter, and no phone home stuff either). Perhaps Oracle-like in a way, as it makes it easier to deploy more than what you have licensed then they can come audit you... I'm sure you can easily buy vmware keys on ebay or other places that would work fine (at least pre-broadcom), since there was no activation process(pre broadcom anyway) there was no way for them to block keys from being reused. Just did a search for esxi keygen and apparently they put this out in the open: https://gist.github.com/DnsKzn/60e190caa4d630afe77c0bc85a5a307b lots of vmware keys.
I'd like to think that still the majority of software out there is like that(preferred to me), no phone home, honor system for licensing. Microsoft is that way for at least Windows server+SQL. If I have X number of windows server licenses as far as I can tell nothing stops me from re-using them over and over(eventually they may come try to audit). Also MS licenses stuff differently for VMs, and again is honor system, it has no way to know if you are deploying Windows VMs on more underlying physical servers or physical CPUs/cores than what you purchased, as technically in some(most?) cases you must license all of the underlying CPUs in your VM environment that run Windows VMs, regardless of whether or not you are using even more than a single core on a single server.
Last I checked there was no license keys needed for SQL server. Unsure if MS provides ISO images for SQL if you don't have a license, but I just checked internet archive and there is a SQL Server 2022 standard edition available for download. You can download SQL server developer edition that is free (I don't think there are any differences technically between that and enterprise??)
From what I've seen at a previous job VMWare offer an appliance (VMware Usage Meter or VUM in my day, now vCloud Usage Meter) which can be applied to all of their products, which ties in to the API of a VMWare product and will gather data on various factors - for VMWare Horizon View that's users logged in, how long they were logged in for, what they were accessing (desktop names etc) etc. For vCenter it gathered unique hardware IDs for each ESXi server, VMs running on each ESXi (by name), how long they'd been running for, the hardware sizes of the ESXi hosts and guests, etc etc.
With the level of information gathered you could either have VUM upload that to the VMWare servers automatically, or for offline environments produce a nice report (emailed or put into a share) which you could then exfiltrate through whatever processes and email to VMWare licensing showing how much capacity you'd used so they could calculate how much you owed them.
It's very nice of these vendors I must say to make it so easy to work out how much money you owe them, very convenient to have your wallet drained every quarter!
I'm sure there are some really critical deployments of VMWare but I bet the majority of them, possibly 90+% are just throwaway stuff that any VM could do with any appreciable difference in performance - virtual desktops, CI/CD runners and whatnot.
Given that VMWare seem to be suing their own customers and getting very aggressive maybe it's time for companies to explore their alternatives. Start with the throwaway stuff and work up. There are many alternatives, e.g. OpenStack, Proxmox, Nutanix etc. A big company could probably even roll its own infrastructure or contribute to an open framework.
Prattling on about? We have multiple VMWare ESX servers and the majority of instances are running inhouse images - gitlab runners and things like that. Things that any VM framework could handle onsite or even the cloud. So why do we use VMWare ESX? Inertia. That's it. If VMWare start acting like dicks then it could easily overcome that inertia and there is no reason it wouldn't be viable to move away entirely.
And yes there will be customers with critical systems who need expensive 24/7 hour support and suchlike. I do not believe the majority of VMs are used that way. Other companies are just like us with a bunch of inhouse reasons for using VMs that could be moved to some other framework with minimal disruption to their business.
Companies have been exploring alternatives for over a year now...I made a comment last year regarding AT&T who was at one point a very big supporter of Openstack, then one year they dropped of the list of supporters, and apparently moved to VMware(as the news article was about AT&T complaining about vmware support fee costs).
AT&T had invested upwards of a decade of time in Openstack, and probably only they know if they continued to use it even after deploying(more) vmware. But given they dropped off the contributor list that seemed like a pretty significant signal they weren't too focused on Openstack anymore.
Speaking of which I just checked their list again, and another super huge company Verizon dropped off their list as well, though they were just a corporate sponsor of Openstack(back in 2017 at least), vs AT&T was the highest tier "Platinum Member".
One thing Broadcom has done for sure is infuse a ton of motivation and money(whether customer money and/or investments into the software) into the vmware alternatives.
I would be surprised if VMware could actually prove what Siemans actually owned and had purchased - their historical record keeping wasn't good and due to the ravages of time and products being EOL'ed with entitlements being transferred to replacements in messy ways I wouldn't trust VMware's records at all.
If using a typical dual socket server (by far the most used I've seen out in the field), and the minimum core count per socket is 16...
72 cores is only 2 1/4 host hypervisors. (most likely you'd want to be buying at least 96 cores for a 3-host minimum cluster?).
How many companies are really doing just one or two host VMware clusters?
They may mean 72 core minimum per socket(or per server)? At one point I think vmware changed their scheme so 1 socket was considered 32 cores, so if you had a 64 core CPU you needed 2 licenses for that CPU. And if you had a 48 core CPU, you needed... 2 x 32 core licenses(I think...), and I don't think those licenses could span more than 1 socket.
otherwise, purchasing in 72 core blocks doesn't seem like it would be too huge of a deal in the grand scheme of things if that license can span sockets and/or servers.
also wouldn't surprise me if the 72 core minumum turns out to be per socket, I wouldn't be too surprised to see AMD and/or Intel release 72-core CPUs(since there would be a huge demand for that to maximize license utilization, though broadcom would have to demonstrate that they won't change the rule to 73 cores a year later). I think similar things have been done in the past at least regarding Oracle DB licensing on one or more occasions.
I know someone who works for Siemens. He has enough problems and worries there without Broadcom VMware being a new pain in the ass. You would think they would have given Siemens extra licenses to cover the breadth of their entire massive US footprint, and charge appropriately ahead of time, instead of deciding to sue A MASSIVE CLIENT after the fact. Especially after only 6 or 7 months have passed.
How is it that an Android app developer can easily paywall "Pro" features, but VMware can't code their shit to keep track of how many installs have been performed and report back to the C&C server? Seems fishy as hell. Old Shareware software did better. Even a situation where Siemens couldn't perform any more installs could have triggered much less panic.
Now I'm not meaning Siemens isn't being screwy on their end. After all, they're currently trying to screw over their union workers regarding contract renewal and the opening salvo was a joke and rejected, because it comes out to a net loss in wages after inflation. The aforementioned person I know of is now worried about that bucket of shit too, and the ramifications that could lead to a strike or worse.
Posted anonymously for painfully obvious reasons.
Could say the same for Microsoft per my comment above, SQL server enterprise is not cheap to license, but if you have the software(available from archive.org), there are no keys to install, no activation, pure honor system. I think still that is how most software operates. Oracle too(last I checked), one of the most expensive off the shelf software products available(at one point costed ~$40,000 per CPU for base Enterprise edition without any addons, don't know about now), free to download, no license keys. Hell even Oracle Java you must pay for in a commercial environment, no license keys, no activation.
99% of old shareware didn't do any validation other than the fact that the key was a valid form. Keygens were released for countless programs over the years.
vmware was the same, you bought a license, used their portal to issue the key(s) and then used the keys. The software validated the keys were in the right form, that's it. Obviously old shareware/etc you didn't have to go to a license portal to get the keys.
So far what I have seen from this whole tirade of BroadScum taking over VMware ... they can do what they want, and they do what they want. There is no viable alternative for the enterprise. If there was we wouldn't have these discussions.
It's been 2-3 years already... surely we should see alternatives if they were present or?
