Broadcom pressures VMware customers with cease-and-desist letters over perpetual licenses

Editor's take: After acquiring VMware in 2023, Broadcom has wasted no time reshaping the company into a profit-focused operation, often at the expense of good customer relations. The latest move in this contentious strategy involves cease-and-desist letters sent to VMware users, warning that they won't receive new patches or bug fixes unless they continue paying for official support.

Broadcom wants to push every single VMware customer "owning" a perpetual license to a new subscription-based contract, and is willing to antagonize the entire VMware userbase to reach this goal. Companies and professionals still using VMware products have recently started receiving a new kind of cease-and-desist letter, with Broadcom asking for new support contracts or even threatening an active "inquiry" into users' systems.

The letters are seemingly targeting VMware customers that acquired a perpetual license before Broadcom digested the virtualization giant. Some organizations are threatened because they chose not to ...