VMware is suing the US arm of industrial giant AG Siemens. The Broadcom company claims that Siemens outed itself by revealing to VMware that it downloaded and distributed multiple copies of VMware products without buying a license.
VMware filed the lawsuit (PDF) on March 21 in the US District Court for the District of Delaware, as spotted by The Register.
In the complaint, VMware says that it has had a Master Software License and Service Agreement with Siemens since November 28, 2012. The virtualization company claims that in September, Siemens sent VMware a purchase order for maintenance and support services. Siemens was reportedly looking to exercise a previously agreed-upon option for a one-year renewal of support services. However, the list of VMware technology that Siemens was seeking support for “included a large number of products for which [VMware] had no record of Siemens AG purchasing a license,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit also reads: “In the context of attempting to exercise the option… to purchase a one-year renewal of Support Services for certain eligible licensed products for the year following the expiration of the ELA in September 2024, Siemens AG revealed that it had downloaded, copied, distributed, and deployed thousands of copies of VMware products for which it had never purchased a license.”
