Broadcom is going head-to-head with Siemens in a dispute over VMware software licenses in what is the latest battle between the vendor and clients disgruntled with its licensing overhaul.

VMware filed a 35-page lawsuit against the American arm of the industrial giant back in March, alleging that when it came time to negotiate new support contracts, Siemens was using far more VMware products than it actually had licenses for.

The latest twist in the tale has seen VMware turn up the heat on a dispute that had cooled in recent months. According to The Register, the vendor is trying to block Siemens' attempt to move the case from courts in the U.S. to Germany.

In June, Siemens filed for a forum non conveniens – a request to move a case to another court, because it is a more appropriate forum to hear the dispute, even if said original court has the legal authority to hear it.

The conglomerate's reasoning behind its request for a jurisdictional shift was based on contractual obligations, arguing a clause in their Master Software License Agreement (MSLA) signed with VMware back in 2012, that stipulated legal disputes should be resolved in the courts of Munich, Germany.

This week, however, VMware argued that the dispute was not one of contractual concerns, but of copyright, arguing that the prior agreement did not cover statutory copyright claims and that the alleged infringement by Siemens' U.S. affiliates makes the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware the appropriate venue for the lawsuit.

“Siemens fundamentally mischaracterizes what has led to this suit,” a letter from VMware’s lawyers to the court cited by The Reg reads. “VMware did not cause or ask for the circumstances that gave rise to the suit. Siemens caused the problem by improperly obtaining and using a large number of VMware products for which it never purchased a license.”

There’s another point to VMware’s decision to defend having the case heard in the U.S. over Germany, and that’s forum shopping – a concept where litigants (or in this instance, defendants) seek a specific court or jurisdiction with the goal of a more favorable judgment. In the copyright-adjacent world of patents, for example, litigants have often sought to file disputes in the Eastern District of Texas due to its infamous speed at handling related cases – earning it the unofficial title as the ‘Patent Rocket Docket.’

Under U.S. copyright law, VMware would be entitled to far greater potential damages and potentially stricter remedies than a simple breach of contract claim in German civil courts.

The vendor’s argument over jurisdiction largely focuses on the fact that the alleged copying and deployment of unlicensed software instances happened using U.S.-based servers and across U.S. affiliates of Siemens.

The case continues. SDxCentral has contacted both parties for comment.

Another lawsuit comes as customers head for the exit

VMware’s spat with Siemens is one of a growing number of legal disputes that have arisen in the wake of parent Broadcom’s licensing overhaul.

The vendor no longer offers support for older products with perpetual licenses, instead encouraging customers to sign up to its Cloud Foundation suite (VCF), which bundles VMware’s core products – including vSphere, vSAN, and SDDC Manager, among others.

Customers have reported that the overall cost for the revamped license has soared compared to what they were previously paying, with some unhappy about having to pay more for software products they don't even want to use.

Those changes have already seen a handful of lawsuits filed from disgruntled customers, including British supermarket giant Tesco, which filed a breach of contract suit in July over changes to perpetual license support.

Telecom giant AT&T made a similar complaint last September, alleging VMware parent Broadcom was attempting to “bully” the carrier into “paying a king’s ransom for subscriptions [it] does not want or need.”

AT&T’s dispute was settled a month later, but the dispute with Tesco is still ongoing.

Those disputes add to a complaint filed with the EU General Court by the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) over the bloc’s alleged failure to address market dominance concerns prior to Broadcom’s takeover of the software firm.

VMware has already been dealt a legal blow by one former customer: The national water agency of the Netherlands.

In June, a Dutch court ordered Broadcom to continue providing support to the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, even though the agency sought to switch to an alternative provider.

Lawsuits aside, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan still proudly proclaimed during its September Explore event that more than 90% of VMware’s 10,000 largest customers signed up for the vendor’s VCF platform – with uncertainty about how much value it believes it can derive from targeting hundreds of thousands of smaller legacy customers.

That’s seen a sizable numbers of logos upstick and go to rivals like Nutanix. Recent Gartner reports suggest that VMware could lose as much as 35% of workloads by 2028, with offerings from hyperscalers – such as Azure Local or AWS Outposts – looking like tantalizing alternatives.

In the past week alone, Nutanix reported that it’s picked up 640 VMware customers in the past quarter – marking more than 2,700 such migrations for its full fiscal 2025.