I invest a lot of effort into building up a virtual machine library, and VMWare promptly sack their entire Fusion team. Bad choice, me.
VMWare claim they’re going to continue the development of the (profitable) product. I wonder how they can do that without their engineers’ intimate knowledge of the product, the knowledge needed to develop it?
I am going to be very dubious about any new versions which won’t have been in the pipeline before the mass sackings (read: next version, presuming it comes out soon), and in particular about security patches.
This is a classic example of the arguments for open source. If your work depends on a corporate who have the power to take the platform on which you’re standing from under you, then you’re never safe. I learnt that lesson for programming languages with the UCSD Pascal débacle: programmers starting building their careers on the language, which was then bought out by a corporate, fucked up and cancelled, destroying those careers. I fear I’m about to learn that lesson again.
Sod it, having just done all this bloody work to build up a virtual machine library, I’m probably going to have to switch technologies. Actually, I may switch to this one: those guys understand the need to be seen to keep a product breathing even when it’s not profitable: keep your customers confident in their supplier’s dependability. I might as well face it: I’m going to have to research the market again.