The latest in a series of statements exchanged between Broadcom CEO Hock Tan and the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade group called out VMware’s new owner for obfuscating the issues at the heart of this hotly debated acquisition.

While Tan framed his company’s switch from perpetual licensing to a subscription licensing model as supportive of both competition and innovation, “the subscription license model has never been the problem,” CISPE Secretary General Francisco Mingorance said.

Instead, the real threats to the economic viability of cloud services used by European consumers are the massive and “unjustifiable” price hikes, re-bundling of products, changes in billing and “the imposition of unfair software licensing terms that restrict choice and lock in customers and partners,” Mingorance said.

Mark Boost, CEO of cloud services provider Civo, stands in solidarity with CISPE’s rejection of Broadcom’s recent decisions. “They are empty words and confirm what many VMware customers have known for a while,” Boost told SDxCentral.

“Broadcom's acquisition was initially sold as a signpost for the future of cloud computing. But for most companies, this has not been the case, with vast increases in licensing costs and uncertainty when facing future updates and developments causing significant impacts, [which are] not resolved by Broadcom tinkering with its Cloud Foundation bundle,” Boost said.

Unfair licensing negates the cloud’s magic Subscription licensing typically means a flexible, pay-as-you-go model designed to scale resources up or down based on real-time demand. CISPE ascertains, however, that Broadcom’s new subscription licensing terms are the opposite – and more accurately described as “anti-cloud,” Mingorance said.

The new model requires partners to commit and pay up front for virtualization capacity, even if they may not need the entire capacity.

“Instead of paying-as-you-go for actual consumption (based on memory used), as is common for cloud infrastructure and for VMware previously, the new terms insist on up-front commitment to three  years-worth of capacity based on server cores that could be used,” Mingorance explained.

These unfair software licensing practices from leading vendors ultimately serve to undermine the fundamental value of the public cloud – being able to run cloud services when and where they are required. “This is like being forced to pay, in advance, for a fleet of taxis that you may or may not use in the next 3 years,” he said.

Broadcom’s insulting offer CISPE called out Broadcom’s offer to continue zero-day patch support for existing perpetual license customers as “insulting in its limitations,” Mingorance said.

According to Tan, perpetual license users can continue to use their VMware services based on those legacy license models, but they will not have access to ongoing maintenance and support of those services unless they move to a subscription license. But, Broadcom will offer “free access to zero-day security patches for supported versions of vSphere, and we’ll add other VMware products over time,” Tan wrote.

Agreeing to only fix critical software flaws – unless a move to the new licensing model is in the picture – “verges on racketeering,” Mingorance said.

CISPE also found fault with Broadcom’s independent actions, which contradict the interests of customers and partners. “By lecturing customers on what they need and insisting against real-world evidence to the contrary that new prices are lower,” CISPE members feel like the wool is being pulled over their eyes. Luckily, this is a cheap polyester blend, and it’s see-through.

Based on new bundles, the shift away from memory-based pricing to core-based pricing and the removal of a few popular products, “prices are not lower but have, in fact, jumped by factors of six-, ten- or even 12-times,” Mingorance said.

CISPE called for formal investigations into these practices. “The ability for dominant software providers to unilaterally ‘pick winners’ by deciding who can and who cannot license their software is a clear form of discrimination,” Mingorance said. “We urge the European Commission and other powerful regulators to act now to halt this tide of abuse that is damaging Europe’s shift to the cloud and digital growth.”