Quality nightmare
By now, the VMWare "time bomb" issue would have been flogged to death. May be not ...
It will be revisited every time there is a major debacle. However, I tend to pity their QA team. After all, they are a bunch of engineers who will be finger pointed for what was basically a business policy. May be for verifying proprietary stuff, companies should be having a separate QA team to verify things like license, expiry codes etc?
I can assure you, such stuff won't happen with FOSS software.