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Broadcom yanks ESXi Free version, effective immediately
(kb.vmware.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Along with the termination of perpetual licensing, Broadcom has also decided to discontinue the Free ESXi Hypervisor, marking it as EOGA (End of General Availability).
Wiktionary: Adjective perpetual (not comparable) Lasting forever, or for an indefinitely long time.
Hello ProxMox here I come!
They're terminating in the sense that they won't sell it anymore. They're not breaking the licensing they've already sold (mostly, there was some fuckery with activating licensing they sold through third parties)
Sort of. The activation license will work as long as you have it. They won't renew support though, which effectively kills it when the support contract runs out.
You won't be able to upgrade to new versions when the support contract runs out, but you can install updates to the existing version as long as updates are made for it. This has always been the lifecycle for perpetual licensing. It's good forever, but at a certain point it becomes a security risk to continue using. The difference here is they won't sell you another perpetual license when the lifecycle is up.
Proxmox is questionable open-source, performs poorly and will most likely end up burning the free users at some point. Get get yourself into LXC/LXD/Incus that does both containers and VMs, is way more performant and clean and is also available on Debian's repositories.
You know, you can recommend lxd and whatever without putting out FUD about proxmox and other tech.
While I get your point... I kind of can't: https://lemmy.world/comment/7476411
What about Proxmox makes its license questionable?
Nothing that is more questionable than lxd, which now requires a contributor license agreement, allowing canonical to not open source their hosted versions, despite lxd being agpl.
Thankfully, it's been forked as incus, and debian is encouraging users to migrate.
But yeah. They haven't said what makes proxmox's license questionable.
Yes, the people running the original LXC and LXD projects under Canonical now work on Incus under the Linux Containers initiative. Totally insulated from potential Canonical BS. :)
The move from LXD to Incus should be transparent as it guarantees compatibility for now. But even if you install Debian 12 today and LXD from the Debian repository you're already insulated from Canonical.
First they're always nagging you to get a subscription. Then they make system upgrades harder for free customers. Then the gatekeep you from the enterprise repositories in true RedHat fashion and have important fixes from the
pve-no-subscriptionrepository multiple times.As long as the source code is freely available, that's entirely congruent with GPL, which is one of the most stringent licenses. You can lay a lot of criticism on their business practices, and I would not deploy this on my home server, but it haven't seen any evidence that they're infringing any licenses.
Okay if you want to strictly look at licenses per si no issues there. But the rest of what I described I believe we can agree is very questionable, takes into questionable open-source.
I beg to differ. Building a business model around open source is tricky at best. There's always tradeoffs, and their model means they have less support from the broader community as their project will be used less. It's their choice to make and I don't see anything questionable with it. It's one of the stated goals of GPL to not impede business with open source.
Proxmox isn't making you sign away rights granted by the license - that to me is questionable legally and downright bullshit morally. Again, what they're doing is fine, even if it makes their product undesirable to me.
Thank you for putting the word out on Incus as an alternative to Proxmox, one that is likely to fit the needs of many that are ill served by Proxmox. But besmirching their reputation on moral grounds doesn't do anyone any favors. It ends up soiling the reputation of Incus as a side effect, even.
I'm not sure if you came across my other comment about Proxmox (here) but unfortunately it isn't just "besmirching their reputation on moral grounds".
Also, I would like to add that a LOT of people use Proxmox to run containers and those containers are currently LXC containers. If one is already running LXC containers why not have the full experience and move to LXD/Incus that was made by the same people and designed specifically to manage LXC and later on VMs?
After all Proxmox jumps through hoops when managing LXC containers as they simply retrofitted both their kernel and
pve-container/pctthat were originally developed to manage OpenVZ containers.I have, and was based on that I wrote what I did. I still think those choices are business decisions that are not against open source, neither the letter or the spirit of the licenses. It seems you disagree.
Why not, indeed? I thanked you before for raising awareness for that. Please keep up. It's really the "Proxmox is fake open source" discourse I take issue with. I think it would be more helpful if you said "and you get all security updates for free with Incus, unlike Proxmox." It's a clear, factual message, devoid of a value judgement. People don't like to be told what to think.
Also it's weird that you take issue with Proxmox but not LXD. From what I read in the Incus initial announcement, what Canonical did with LXD is barely legal and definitely against the spirit of its license. Incus is a drop in replacement. Why even bring LXD up?
And, as far as micro to small installations go, TrueNAS is another alternative that plays well with open source (AFAIK). Unlikely to be used specifically for VMs or containers, but it's a popular choice for home servers for a reason.
To sum it up: I'm trying to provide some constructive criticism of your approach. But I'm just an internet stranger so... You do you. I hope you think about it, though.
Mostly because we're on a transition period from LXD into Incus. If you grab Debian 12 today you'll get LXD 5.0.2 LTS from their repositories that is supported both by the Debian team and the Incus team. Most online documentation and help on the subject can also be found under "LXD" more easily. Everyone should be running Incus once Debian 13 comes along with it, but until then the most common choice is LXD from Debian 12 repositories. I was never, and will never suggest anyone to install/run LXD from Canonical.
I won't say I don't get your point, I get it, I kinda pushed it a bit there and you're right. Either way what stops Proxmox from doing the same thing BCM/ESXi did now? We're talking about a for profit company and the alternative Incus sits behind the Linux Containers initiative that is effectively funded by multiple parties.
Yes, TrueNAS can be interesting for a lot of people and they also seem to want to move into the container use-case with TrueNAS Scale but that one is still more broken than useful.
What stops Proxmox is the same thing "stopping" Canonical. The next day there'll be a fork and anyone can start selling pro support for it, further encroaching in their business model.
Regarding TrueNAS, there's nothing broken. You can can sideload both containers and VMs. You can say it's inconvenient, but again, it'll be suited for some people, not so much for others.
But Canonical is no longer a concern since Incus has nothing to do with them...
As I said, a lot of the interesting software available via TrueCharts is broken or poorly maintained, this is sad as it would be a great solution.
"How dare this business try to make money?!!"
Open source still has to exist within the framework of capitalism. I am all for building the fully automated luxury gay space communist utopia where people just build awesome software and release it for free all the time without ever having to worry about paying the bills (seriously, I would encourage every open-source advocate to think about how much more awesome stuff we would have if universal basic income was a thing), but that is simply not the world we're in right now. They need to keep the lights on, and that means advertising their paid services.