VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

TIL VMware Fusion is free now. https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/11/11/vmware-...

"As of March 2025, the current versions of VMware Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro are available at no charge for all use cases, including personal, educational, and commercial use. Users no longer need to purchase a license for these versions for any scenario. Broadcom will continue releasing updates and security patches but will no longer sell new support contracts for these versions."

FYI. I know we weren't the only ones left gun shy after Oracle's legal team reached out to let us know about the dozen or so employees using VirtualBox from their work laptops a few years ago.

Yes, but just try to download it from them. You have to make an account, agree to all kinds of garbage, and then you still might be stuck in "authorization" like my account is. They removed the auto-update functionality (even the notification!) from the app, so you have to manually go through their horrendous website to download updates.

It's 10x easier to just search reddit or internet archive for a link to the .dmg.

Yep! I use it to run SolidWorks on my M1 Macbook. (They sure don't make it easy, though - one of their many EULA approval steps fails silently if you have any non-alphanuneric characters in your name or email address. Feels par for the course with bigcorp software that assumes you'll have an IT team to deal with things.)

If your name or email address has non-alphanumeric characters, their entire authorization/EULA flow breaks silently. I had to use an old email to get it to work.

> They removed the auto-update functionality (even the notification!) from the app

Oh, they didn’t want to deal with the “token” bullshit they added to the VMware download site that the updates come from. That’s why.

https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/03/24/downloa...

> They removed the auto-update functionality (even the notification!) from the app, so you have to manually go through their horrendous website to download updates.

That's not true. The auto-update functionality is still there, it just doesn't find anything. (At least this is the case for Workstation; I assume it's similar for Fusion)

Ok, but Parallels Desktop is actively supported.

Wireshark it and watch the 403 kick back from the server (because of the new token policy).