The flood of #enshittification that #Broadcom unleashed upon #VMware and its customers after acquiring it, and its seismic waves in the whole IT supply chain, are a testament of how bad managers who seek for short-term revenue hikes without thinking of the long-term are a cancer, and walking ticking bombs for the tech industry.

theregister.com/2026/01/15/del…

We all know what Broadcom did to VMware after acquiring it. VMware was turned overnight into Broadcom’s cash cow, they hiked prices by 3x in some cases, scrapped perpetual licenses, forced all customers into more expensive subscriptions, said that they only wanted to focus on the most profitable customers and fuck everyone else, all while worsening customer support and providing literally zero added value and features to the product.

Basically a parasitic acquisition solely focused on sucking all the vital lymph out of another product - pure Oracle textbook.

When you play such stunts with individual customers, unfortunately, it works most of the times. Individuals don’t have much leverage, nor choice if there is too much concentration in a certain market. They may complain, but often they swallow the bitter bite.

Things are different when you play them in huge corporate products that are an integral part of the IT infrastructure we all use.

It turns out that among the businesses who were disgruntled when Broadcom suddenly cancelled their VMware perpetual licenses there was Tesco.

But Tesco didn’t acquire VMware licenses directly from Broadcom, of course. They acquired them through a reseller of hardware and software licenses - Computacenter. So Tesco sued them instead for failing to provide them the licenses that they were contractually bound to provide.

Computacenter, on its hand, didn’t acquire VMware licenses directly either. They were provided with the Dell servers they sold, as Dell was an authorized VMware reseller. So Computacenter sued Dell.

Dell, on its hand, says that it has no fault if Broadcom has suddenly changed VMware’s pricing model, and that they are the ones who broke contracts with the whole downstream supply chain. So Dell sued Broadcom.

And there we go. A chain of 3 lawsuits between 4 giants across the whole IT supply chain in order to call a parasitic company accountable.

What a mess. But I guess that the manager who proposed to squeeze annual recurring revenue got his/her fat quarterly bonus home after things seemed to work for the first year.

This is also your daily reminder that as a sysadmin you must use only FOSS products supported by the community and by strong foundations - and contribute back to them once their success becomes your success too.

Enough with the “but stability - but support - but licenses - but my manager” corporate bullshit.

The cost of writing your own little qemu CI/CD pipeline to spin up your virtual machines is much lower than the risk of your corporate subscription getting suddenly enshittified by chains of wrong financial incentives at any place in your upstream supply chain, and having to spend years of tears on expensive long-chain lawsuits.

And, even if things go bad, the cost of migrating out of proprietary and non-standard implementations is usually much higher than the cost of migrating to a compatible fork.

Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it

Exclusive: Retail giant's disty, reseller, and vendor all say they can't and won't sell

^{Simon Sharwood (The Register)}

A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth: bitchat.free/

Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

Today is the ten year anniversary for one of the best email series I ever received. The "Instagram and Spotify hacking ring" one.

daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/19…

“Subject: Urgent Warning”

Back in December I got a desperate email from this person. A woman who said her Instagram had been hacked and since she found my contact info in the app she mailed me and asked for help.

^{daniel.haxx.se}

Please boost!

Ik ben benieuwd hoe veel Vlamingen er actief bezig zijn op Fediverse.
Is dit een social media die ‘er toe doet’?

• Vlaming / Flemish (36%, 53 votes)
• Rest van de wereld / rest of the world (63%, 93 votes)

Now with MQTTS (#curl)

daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/19…

Now with MQTTS

Back in 2020 we added MQTT support to curl. When curl 8.19.0 ships in the beginning of May 2026, we have also added MQTTS; meaning MQTT done securely over TLS.

^{daniel.haxx.se}

Are there any #FOSDEM parties / meet-ups happening on Friday 30th?

If not, anyone up for a beer and a bite to eat somewhere?

Hey @Tutanota do you know mubi.com considers tuta.com email addresses invalid? I tried to convince their customer support its their problem but they're giving me some resonse which makes no sense. Is there something y'all can do?

#Mubi #Tuta #degoogle #privacy