AT&T sues Broadcom for refusing to renew perpetual license support
AT&T sues Broadcom for refusing to renew perpetual license support
Ars cited in lawsuit AT&T recently filed against Broadcom.
I mean fuck AT&T, but fuck needless consolidation, pointless service bundling, and revocation of perpetual licences even more.
117Also just fuck Broadcom in general for all the other dumb shit they do.
68This isn't a revocation of a perpetual license. This is about broadcom not offering their support services any more. ATT still has the perpetual license to use the software they bought
23The wise thing is to not offer perpetual licenses in the first place. You can't predict the state of your business in 10 years let alone beyond that. Why make commitments that? Marketing of course. So if they're going to raise capital that way (by one-time revenue from sales of perpetual licenses) then they can't just decide that perpetual doesn't mean perpetual anymore. All in all this will come down to a legal duel between expensive legal teams.
12Perpetual licences have their place, like I'm reasonably confident under the hood you have a perpetual licences for the OS your phone runs on. The point isn't to get a piece of software that will be updated and supported forever, it's to get something that works, fits your needs, and that you know can't just be revoked at the whim of another. Problem is that last one is becoming increasingly untrue.
10
Whoa battle of the mega corps
40Oh no. Anyway.
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I'm sure it's different with enterprise contracts, but VMWare support was next to useless when I used to pay for it on 20 servers. Not once did a problem get solved, and some of them must have been pretty widespread bugs from what I recall.
24This seems to be common among most software/hardware vendors these days. I can't get good support from Microsoft, Citrix, Juniper, Cisco, etc.
8I got good support from redhat, had an individual dev help out with a difficult openshift deployment.
1Most larger companies I’ve work for can’t use vendors that don’t have support contracts because somebody wrote that into company policy. It’s a risk management thing. Don’t want to spend millions on something only to find out nobody can figure out how to make it work. So the vendors were forced to have support teams otherwise their sales guys never would have gotten a foot in the door. They aren’t really incentivized to make it actually good. The sale is made at that point. From my experience companies love to fall into the sunk cost fallacy. So the crap support is ironically overlooked and they keep purchasing from that vendor regardless.
1I never knew Microsoft even had support. Was part of a very large (worldwide) enterprise and remember the other teams complaining about lack of anything when trying to escalate issues.
1
Did you try to reboot?
/s
3It's not different really. Either it is obvious and you don't need them or its your hardware vendor's fault (according to them). Still better than Oracle's software support, which is not a high bar.
3I have had to contact the vmware enterprise support several times and while it was tedious to do so, they always managed to help us out, including when we had datastore locked vhd's after a storage crash.
1
lol, company gets hosed by the same crap they do to consumers. “Lifetime” licenses aren’t lifetime.
21Not really the same thing. "Lifetime warranties" have for decades now referred to the lifetime of the product as stated in the warranty, not the lifetime of the consumer.
Any consumer still interpreting "Lifetime" in this context to mean "the rest of my life", is just being stupid. Read the terms of the agreement before assuming you know what it protects...
"Perpetual licensing" on the other hand, is pretty clearly defined as "pay once, use forever", so to sunset that agreement and start charging subscription fees is fraudulent.
9There have been instances of things like “lifetime licenses” or free services that were “free forever” that turned around and started subscription services. I hope this clarifies my intent, I did not indicate a “warranty”.
2Did it used to mean the consumers lifetime?
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It spans the lifetime of this nugget here.
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It's called "perpetual" but obviously, it's capped at a certain very reasonable limit.
21My university purchased a large number of Adobe Suite licenses years ago. Then we got a threatening letter that we never bought perpetual licenses and they were considering suing us.
Know what’s a thing? Figma.
20
AT&T feels it should be granted a one-year renewal for VMware support services, which it claimed would be the second of three one-year renewals to which its contract entitles it.
The software licenses are perpetual, the support services require ongoing contracts. I don't think I've ever heard of having a contract to a contract. Maybe if you're as big as AT&T they let you do this, but having a contract that says "we have the option to renew our support contract three times" seems silly. Usually either both parties agree to renew it at expiration, or not.
17At enterprise scale I can see a contract for being able to renew your support contract. Aka for us to implement this, we expect you to support it but we aren't going to pay you up front in case it doesn't pan out or we drop the project.
30contract "options" are indeed normal. You could also lump in government contracts into the category your thinking about. I've never heard of a scenario where the vendor broke contract by not honoring the options. I also have never dealt with a vendor getting bought out and then not honoring existing contracts. Super fun to watch the corporate drama. I personally don't care for the private equity style business that seems to be an even bigger problem than the investor first/profit centric model that I thought was the worst thing.
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I don't think it's unusual.
Big companies need a promise of some length of support in order to commit to a product.
10The set number of renewals locks in the price and generally also allows the customer to not renew if that is their desire.
7
I like this case for the matter that I don't think there is a way for them to really settle, so this could come out with a pretty good precedent for consumers and licenses
16I haven't been following the whole Broadcom-VMWare dumpster fire, but big picture here:
Do you, knowing that Broadcom has been willing to dick you over, really want to continue to buy service from them and be tied to them?
I mean, I'd be wanting restitution if I felt that they violated a contract, but to be transitioning off. Do you actually want support from them when they don't want to provide it? I assume that they're going to do the bare minimum -- and I bet that the support contract doesn't place a lot of floors on what they need to do -- and offer some other kind of "premium" support. It's just an unwinnable battle.
Like, maybe sit down with some other big VMWare customers, pick an alternative that you're happy with while using scale to help convince providers that you care about to also support that alternative, do the move, and use anything you get from Broadcom in court to offset costs.
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