[rando289]

Hah! You are delusional. To be specific, it's obvious he meant virtualbox + the roughtly 2 other less commonly used free desktop virtualization softwares.

Let's spell out the obvious: People, like me, use virtualbox etc. for free instead of paying for vmware fusion / workstation. If the free products didn't exist, vmware would be making much much more money on licenses for worstation etc, and developers would still be getting paid to work on the vmware products.

[wila]

Companies are much more comfortable paying for a product then using the free alternative. Especially as the paid for product has support and a smoother experience.

Free is great for people like you, for others it is also regarded as the value they pay for it.

[detaro]

To take one large group of desktop virtualization users: how many developers would have in the past used VMWare Workstation and now use vagrant + VirtualBox?

[ozyx]

And you don't know what you're talking about.

1. VMware was giving out a free product too (Player).

2. As chipx86 pointed out on his blog post, VMware Workstation and Fusion were profitable.

[Swannie]

Player was crippled, to prompt purchase of Workstation.

Many people I know who were serious about managing their VMs virtual networks were using Virtual Box.

[chipx86]

Player wasn't crippled. It just served a different purpose. It was never meant to be on the same level as VirtualBox or anything, and existed to be a simple "run this VM" application.