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Title: Supermarket Giant Tesco Sues VMware, Warns Lack of Support Could
Disrupt Food Supply

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/03/20182...

Tesco is suing Broadcom and reseller Computacenter for at least $134 million,
claiming that VMware's perpetual license support agreements were breached
after Broadcom's acquisition. The supermarket giant warned it "may not be
able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped," writes
The Register's Simon Sharwood. From the report: Court documents seen by The
Register assert that in January 2021 Tesco acquired perpetual licenses for
VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus subscriptions
to Virtzilla's Tanzu products, and agreed a contract for support services and
software upgrades that run until 2026. Tesco claims VMware also agreed to
give it an option to extend support services for an additional four years.
All of this happened before Broadcom acquired VMware and stopped selling
support services for software sold under perpetual licenses. Broadcom does
sell support to those who sign for its new software subscriptions. The
supermarket giant says Broadcom's subscriptions mean it must pay "excessive
and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already
paid," and "is unable any longer to purchase stand-alone Virtualization
Support Services for its Perpetually Licensed Software without also having to
purchase duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software
products which it already owns." The complaint also alleges that Tesco's
contracts with VMware include eligibility for software upgrades, but that
Broadcom won't let the retailer update its perpetual licenses to cover the
new Cloud Foundation 9. The filing names Computacenter as a co-defendant as
it was the reseller that Tesco relied on for software licenses, and the
retailer feels it's breached contracts to supply software at a fixed price.
Tesco's filing also mentions Broadcom's patch publication policy, which means
users who don't acquire subscriptions can't receive all security updates and
don't receive other fixes. The retailer thinks its contracts mean it is
entitled to those updates. The filing suggests that lack of support is not
just a legal matter, but may have wider implications because VMware software,
and support for it "are essential for the operations and resilience of
Tesco's business and its ability to supply groceries to consumers across the
UK and Republic of Ireland." "VMware Virtualization Software underpins the
servers and data systems that enable Tesco's stores and operations to
function, hosting approximately 40,000 server workloads and connecting to, by
way of illustration, tills in Tesco stores," the filing states. Tesco's
filing warns that Broadcom, VMware, and Computacenter are each liable for at
least $134 million damages, plus interest, and that the longer the dispute
persists the higher damages will climb.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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