Maritz apologises to VMware customers again
Yay for DRM
Let's look at the facts;
What we had here was a BETA release of vmware ESX.
Now, any proper admin that tries to run a beta hypervisor in thier production network deserves everything they get. EMC really should have left any sys admins who were stupid enough to do this to their own devices.
There is no need to make this scenario even more unsanitary for genuine users by injecting a destructive time bomb into said beta code, especially when there is a good chance that this time bomb will end up in subsequent production code.
This is the problem. Beta code is supposed to represent a potential future release of production code with any bugs identified during the beta test rectified before any actual release.
What EMC has done is hide a time bomb in their beta which beta testers cannot expect to know about let alone test and then they FORGOT to remove the time bomb when they went to gold status.
OOPS.
This is nothing but extreme incompetence coupled with an unhealthy desire to protect themselves from imaginary unscrupulous users.
If Microsoft had have done this they would have been rightly ridiculed by the entire tech community.
And I say this as a card carrying Microsoft hater as well as a vmware fan.
The point is that my fanboi allegiances are irrelevant. Companies (especially those who purport to service fortune 500 companies) should never infect their own code with such negative "features" in a pathetic attempt to catch the occasional rogue admin who thinks it is a good idea to run their production servers on beta code.
EMC/VMware deserve all the ridicule they get.
