This is an example of VMWare getting high on their horse again. Back in the early 00's, I was working at a large university, and thanks to VMWare's $49 academic/hobby Workstation license, I got my entire department onto it (we all used Linux on the desktop), and I bought myself a personal home license. This was the v1.x days.
I forget if it was the 2.x -> 3.x or 3.x -> 4.x upgrade, but they eventually dropped the hobby/academic cheap licensing and the price jumped to something like $150 per seat. I remember calling our sales contact and complaining about how much the jump sucked, and when they wouldn't budge, I essentially told no thanks and that I'd wait for the open source options to mature. He, of course, chuckled at this quaint notion.
A few years later I had to chuckle back when they started giving away the basic versions of VMWare, since open source options and Microsoft were by then eating their lunch on the desktop.
Funny how history repeats itself. I hope VMWare lives to regret this latest trend in greed of theirs.
P.S. -- I also had a similar exchange with the Accelerated X folks, back when xfree86 didn't do multi-head very well (or at all). I accused them of gouging their faithful customers and that open source would catch up and they'd be toast. Three cheers for xorg!
Would open source have been way slower to catch up if not for the gouging? If not, then it seems very likely that the "gouging" maximized shareholder value by extracting maximum profits during the period in which they were the sole supplier of a valuable-to-you service. You get (during the period in which they are the only supplier) usage of a product that no one else in the entire world is supplying and they get a few extra bucks. Hard for me to get outraged.
There's also something called "killing the golden goose." If they had more reasonable pricing, they may have been able to extract money from more clients for a longer period. I'm not sure what they current profits look like, but gouging your customers for short term gain while destroying long term profits isn't generally considered a good way to maximize shareholder value.
The other scenario is that keeping prices reasonable means there isn't as much demand for an open source version. Developers who balked at paying $150 a seat wouldn't be sufficiently motivated if the cost was a more "reasonable" $20 say.
I just remembered a pretty good example of this with the story of BitKeeper and Git, you can read http://kerneltrap.org/node/4966 for more information. It was the catalyst of losing the cheap enough/free option that motivated the work on Git.
I forget if it was the 2.x -> 3.x or 3.x -> 4.x upgrade, but they eventually dropped the hobby/academic cheap licensing and the price jumped to something like $150 per seat. I remember calling our sales contact and complaining about how much the jump sucked, and when they wouldn't budge, I essentially told no thanks and that I'd wait for the open source options to mature. He, of course, chuckled at this quaint notion.
A few years later I had to chuckle back when they started giving away the basic versions of VMWare, since open source options and Microsoft were by then eating their lunch on the desktop.
Funny how history repeats itself. I hope VMWare lives to regret this latest trend in greed of theirs.
P.S. -- I also had a similar exchange with the Accelerated X folks, back when xfree86 didn't do multi-head very well (or at all). I accused them of gouging their faithful customers and that open source would catch up and they'd be toast. Three cheers for xorg!