Still no siteID, still no access to my products YEARS LATER....NOW WHAT!!??

[John F Wiederhirn]

I've been at this so long my account has aged out and had to go back and reestablish it.  I wait for replies on PMs and hear nothing for months at a time, only then to discover the person I worked with is gone from Broadcom.

This is quite possibly the worst product transition I've ever encountered.  I had current Fusion and Workstation licenses as of a couple years ago, and lost access to both the product downloads, license downloads, and any ability to upgrade.  Utterly unacceptable.

Now what?  I still have no working siteID, I still have no entitlements visible.  This needs to change ASAP.

-John W

[RaSystemlord]

Yes, the WEB pages are not very good, the communication is not very good.

However, as a solution to your problem, those are all Free and work without any license for any use (since Nov last year). You can download them from "anywhere". Just google them and pick from you usual download service that you trust. archive dot com, seems to have license keys for older versions, too, which still require a license key, but are free for any use.

[Technogeezer]

Workstation Pro versions before 17.5.2 aren't "free". They still were licensed product that required you to purchase a license. It's only 17.5.2 and later that do not require a license. 

Let's all recognize that there are no longer "entitlements" in Broadcom's eyes for the desktop hypervisor products.  In their eyes, "entitlements" are active subscriptions. All perpetual licenses (for all of their products) have been thrown out the window.

You get Site IDs when you have subscriptions. Desktop products have no subscriptions, therefore no site IDs. 

What bothers me is that they don't honor those perpetual licenses for Fusion and Workstation they inherited from VMware. They really should make available Fusion and Workstation installers for people that purchased licenses instead of forcing those users to go to third-party sites. (They should also  make the licenses that were purchased available as well, but I'd take the installers at a minimum). What harm would there be to make those old versions available? We all know Broadcom no longer supports or updates those old versions, so Broadcom would really have no other cost or liability other than to host the installers.

[RaSystemlord]

Technogeezer: There is one thing that needs clarification.

I don't think that a WEB-site like archive dot org would give out a license key for 17.5.1, if it wasn't Free or rather "free" as you point out. Don't believe that they would go into illegal things: giving license keys for a commercial product. Futhermore, I don't think old versions are de-facto commercial products either, because nobody can buy them. This goes quickly into legal mambo-jambo and differences in different countries, but I would consider the old versions being the same as new versions under these circumstances.

[Technogeezer]

>  I don't think that a WEB-site like archive dot org would give out a license key for 17.5.1, if it wasn't Free or rather "free" as you point out..

Sure they do.  

@RaSystemlord from personal experience , the site you referenced has posted  license keys for obsolete licensed versions of software (such as old Windows versions).

I think that Broadcom would not consider those old versions as no-cost “non-commercial”  licensed software. From all that I’ve seen from them, they did not “grandfather” the new license terms to versions prior to 17.5.2. The questions about what Broadcom would do about users using their product without a purchased license can only be answered by their legal department.  

[RaSystemlord]

Technogeezer: Yes, you are correct that when publishing out-dated commercial software keys, which software is "free of use" with new versions - it starts to be about legalities which are obscure at their best. It depends on the country, they are different to the publisher of the keys than for the user of those keys - anyway, there you have them and you said that they have done it in the past. The matter of the software company "doing something about it", is entirely a different matter and the possible penalty is yet another thing.

As an example: You could say that you have no right to sell software that you bought. Microsoft took to court a student who did that with an educational license of a Microsoft product - that he got a refusal when he tried to it get back to the shop. That was in America, where Microsoft wanted to make that as a warning and the student paid a lot of money for that (you could say in lawyer language that the Microsoft took from the student every dollar that he didn't have) - only in America. In most places in the world, this is very far from being possible.

But yes, I have no idea what the stance of Broadcom is with this.