Broadcom, which acquired VMware's business a year ago, has introduced new distribution terms for proprietary virtualization products for workstations — VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion, which operate on Linux, Windows, and macOS platforms. The previously offered free personal use has now been expanded to cover any applications, including commercial use.
The supply of standalone paid products Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro, which were distributed on a paid subscription basis, has been discontinued. The free versions of VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion will include all the features available in the paid 'Pro' versions. Broadcom will continue to maintain the code base and actively invest in the development of new capabilities. As before, new versions of VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion will be released regularly and undergo a full quality control cycle.
Users who previously had technical support contracts will still be able to contact support directly, or utilize resources from the support portal. After the support contract expires, it will not be possible to renew it, and such clients, like all others, are offered online support through user forums and the documentation catalog. It is noted that the company aims to be more customer-centric — transitioning VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion to free systems will increase the user base, which will help better understand user needs and requests, and use this information to optimize and improve their products.
Let us remind you that Broadcom intends to transition the Linux versions of VMware Workstation to use a hypervisor KVM instead of its proprietary virtualization code. Patches have already been proposed to be included in the Linux kernel, adding the necessary functionality to the KVM hypervisor for running unmodified VMware guest systems using KVM.
Source: opennet.ru
