Broadcom changed their licensing recently, charging much much more for most of their stuff. They also, IIRC, announced Workstation was going away. They are destroying all trust with those who use it. So when they announce this is free, it's hard not to think that means they won't update it any more as they are going to extremes to make $.
All big corps have strings attached on their free stuff, just like they don't contribute to FOSS out of the kindness of their hearts on the management board.
Free offerings from different corps are not equal in their concerns. With Google, my concern is they simply kill or abandon their project. With Oracle, I have to worry about lawyers knocking down my door for a license audit
Google, like other hyperscalers, has some nice surprises on GCP bills, when things go beyond the free to play.
They can also kill someone's business, that depends on those products, or forbid them to use Play Store with similar outcome, even though Android development is mostly free.
> It's actually pretty damning for Fusion that an hobbyist project can punch high enough to "compete" with professional software.
Except that it doesn't.
Last time I've tried to integrate it to the testing system of my
company it didn't support snapshots, CLI interface couldn't be used
through SSH without the GUI subsystem working, and sometimes UTM
displayed crypting errors during VM startups.
Personally I use UTM at least once a week, and when it works then it
works OK, but saying that it matches a commercial product in terms of
functionality means that either someone hasn't really used UTM or
Fusion, or has distorted imagination what should be required of a
software product that should be used in a commercial setting.
If you need a CLI you should be able to just directly use Qemu instead, as UTM is just a frontend for it.
For my needs, UTM is actually superior to Fusion because it supports emulation of other architectures as well as virtualization. This is really handy on Apple Silicon.
I gave up on VirtualBox because their sound broke one day and never got fixed. Switching to qemu wasn't a breeze but it wasn't a debacle either. Just found the right args and saved it as a script
After endless PR blunders, they're trying to lure back customers probably with a spam platform or freemium nonsense. Nope, they shat the bed and now they have to sleep in it.
Literally a few days ago I was on their website trying to figure out how I could possibly get a commercial license just to test an OVA. Going through sales, convincing my manager to make a PO, and going through the expense reimbursement process is a lot of hoops to jump through just to test a virtual machine.
I didn't feel like making a complete overview of the whole landscape, since this news is about VMware workstation in specific. Therefore any VMWare product in use by server hosts would in all likelihood not be VMWare Workstation/Fusion.
Aside from your personal attack, this is besides the point, as this is about a desktop product not a server product, which is the important difference that had to be noted in response to the post I was replying to.
Please refrain from personal attacks on this forum, it's one of the last nice places on the Internet.
That, or OpenStack. I know it's a bigger deal for telcos and wraps kvm, but it's very reliable, scalable, and has all the features a hosting provider would need.
You're right that it's not a hypervisor, but it's not an AWS emulator either. It's a collection of tightly coupled management layers for other open source projects that form a new, cohesive whole that can be competitive with AWS at a medium scale.
It's the complacency trap many FOSS and non-FOSS legacy products fall into when corporate bureaucracy dominates while failing to realize their policies and practices are counterproductive.
CFEngine2->3, SugarCRM, Mongo, Couchbase, any CA or IBM product
A while ago (like ~10 years ago) VMWare workstation, or some of the things virtualbox graphics drivers did, seemed to be the only reasonable ways to run a virtualised desktop with 3d or at more than 5fps. But these days virtio and spice seems to work just fine.
My number one choice for desktop hypervisor on Linux would be virtualbox, except that unity mode hasn’t worked in years and that’s my most needed feature.
It feels like a weird spot to be in that there’s a bunch of competing options and all of them have weirdness or broken features (no slight to the people building these - far be it from me to complain about free stuff).
VMware Workstation was my go to for "Desktop Linux", nowadays I use WSL, and most likely this is the main reason it is now free, before getting the axe eventually.
…”Once your current contract concludes, you can continue using the product. However, please note that support ticketing for troubleshooting will no longer be available.”
I'll never install a VMware product again.