[kraquepype]

Agreed, but it was indispensable when I was learning VMWare over a decade ago for work. Having a free version I could tinker with at home was very useful.

This is just going to kill whatever hobbyist user base they did have, and make it harder to learn the platform.

[misswaterfairy]

And cost VMWare any 'soft influence' they had.

People tinker with free stuff in their own time a lot. Some of those people would have sway in what products a business purchases in future, like virtualisation software for example.

People go with what they know.

[Already__Taken]

it's already costing them, dropped 40k on servers and avoided them like the plague.