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Please elaborate. Are these products likely dead now that Broadcom bought VMWare?

I still use both, but only for VMs on Mac and Windows, which is not how I normally run VMs. (That being KVM/QEMU on Linux.)

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Broadcom changed their licensing recently, charging much much more for most of their stuff. They also, IIRC, announced Workstation was going away. They are destroying all trust with those who use it. So when they announce this is free, it's hard not to think that means they won't update it any more as they are going to extremes to make $.

It’s like Oracle offering something for “free”. We all know it isn’t. The question is just what strings are attached

All big corps have strings attached on their free stuff, just like they don't contribute to FOSS out of the kindness of their hearts on the management board.

Free offerings from different corps are not equal in their concerns. With Google, my concern is they simply kill or abandon their project. With Oracle, I have to worry about lawyers knocking down my door for a license audit

Google, like other hyperscalers, has some nice surprises on GCP bills, when things go beyond the free to play.

They can also kill someone's business, that depends on those products, or forbid them to use Play Store with similar outcome, even though Android development is mostly free.

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