I guess they shouldn't have fired the CEO who built the company and replaced her with a suit from a company that's widely acknowledged to have screwed the pooch on virtualization.
License servers suck. Most of VMware's customers are banks, telcos, and other large firms running ESX farms. They have the money to pay, and they will. Don't fuck them up by breaking their VMs for licensing screwups.
If they wanted a better, but still harsh, solution, print a large alert saying the server is reverting to trial mode and will expire in 30 days time.
If I were to try to imagine the worst bug possible for a virtualization product, this would probably be it. Though I suppose data corruption would be worse.
Well, you can't really blame QA all that much. This would have only been caught if the QA team decided to turn the clock forward a few days just to see what would happen. This was the Developer's fault for not checking the code for expiration on a BETA. Glad we waited to Update to U2 tho!
QA for such a big company, with calendar-sensitive products, should be running full acceptance tests at a number of dates in the future. Malware researchers do this with honeypot machines to see if certain actions are triggered at upcoming dates.
VMWare should be doing this even if for no other reason than to verify that their intended license-expiration works as expected.
Big corporations that have software everyone wants to use can treat their paying customers as beta testers. You know this drill as Microsoft pioneered the practice a long long time ago.
Big corporations also treat their production staff using in-house software as beta testers, even if this costs them many millions of dollars in the few days after each release. (Because hiring a test staff for less than a million would be "too expensive.")
It says a lot when a company can treat customers in the general public like in-house employees it can abuse.
Software licensing - the worst invention since tangled cables.
I don't want key infrastructure to have license keys in it and need new license keys to unlock more features. ESX Server? Firewalls? Routers? No! As little code as possible, as high quality as possible, please.
