Broadcom has announced that the VMware Workstation hypervisor for Windows and Linux and the VMware Fusion virtualization program have become free for everyone for commercial, educational, and personal use. Broadcom has decided to completely move away from a paid subscription for these products. To download VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation, you must register an account on the Broadcom portal.
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The paid versions of these offerings — Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro — are no longer available for purchase, stated the company. Existing agreements will remain in effect until the end of the contract term with the full level of service and enterprise-grade support.
While the free versions of VMware Fusion and Workstation will include all the features available in the paid products, Broadcom will no longer provide users with support tickets to troubleshoot issues.
Broadcom plans to continue developing new features and enhancements and provide timely release of VMware Fusion and Workstation updates. The official announcement is here.
Here are the main events that happened before the software license change.
- In late October 2024, a series of patches are proposed for the Linux kernel by Broadcom that move the VMware Workstation project from proprietary code to using KVM (Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine).
- In May 2024, VMware Workstation Pro for Windows and Linux and Fusion Pro for Mac have become free for personal use.
- On February 8, 2024, the first public release of the VirtualBox KVM backend source code took place. The open source project allows the use of the KVM hypervisor built into the Linux kernel in the VirtualBox virtualization system instead of the vboxdrv kernel module supplied with VirtualBox.
- In early February 2024, Broadcom stopped distributing free versions of VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 7.x and 8.x).
- In January 2024, Broadcom stopped selling VMware perpetual licenses. Broadcom also removed the ability for VMware partners to purchase service contracts directly through the partner portal. This was done to simplify the product portfolio of virtualization systems and for the convenience of corporate clients.
- In November 2023, Broadcom announced that it had completed a $61 billion acquisition of software developer VMware.
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