Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Revamps Licensing Plans
prostoalex writes "Microsoft is introducing significant changes into its licensing program, faced with competition from Linux, as Reuters article suggests. First, Microsoft starts giving away free server licenses to its Software Assurance Program customers, if the PC is not actually used in production and is not present on the network. Such licensing would be convenient for disaster recoveries, where it's important to replace a failed server as soon as possible without calling Microsoft support or licensing partner. Support lifecycle is also extended to 10 years for a variety of products, including Windows 2000, Windows XP and SQL Server 2000."
I've seen many businesses that still run NT4 and I even know a few folks that still use 3.1, but the latter is the exception, rather than the rule. It's pretty expensive to upgrade software, not just in the cost of the product itself, but in lost productivity and people-hours needed to perform the upgrade. when you have a large organization these costs can be prohibitive and procrastination seems very attractive. of course, any other slashdotter probably could tell you the same thing...
IIRC, it used to be five years for most of Microsoft's Windows products.
In contrast, Linux's supposed #1 commercial distribution, Redhat? All official support was pulled after 16 months. I hope people can lobby to keep enterprise business away from Redhat.
The only think NT4 is missing is ...
LDAP authentication support,
Built-in terminal services,
Plug-and-play,
USB,
User switching,
Compatibility modes,
System restore,
An eye-ruining GUI,
A dog that helps you find files.
ceace - Ye frometh thine 1990's!!
/dev/video1 c 81 1 ; ln -s /dev/video1 /dev/video0
modprobe bt989 ; mknod
and tahts in slackware - not exactly user friendly distro of the year.
according to hauppauge's website, it worked out the box on red hat 7.1 (afaik)
(this is based on a bt878 chipset)
With any Linux distribution however, because of the modular structure, you are able to upgrade whatever is needed yourself - almost forever.
Of course the average Winlot will never acknowledge this fact...
You're a moron if you think any kind of M$ support beats any of the alternatives, regardless of their lifespan.
You're just the typical M$ sheep(customer).
Once again /. breaks a month-old story.
They mainly snoop for Windows and office. A friend has a legal XP home machine with Office XP, and a pirated copy of Visual Studio. Never had a Problem with updates. M$ does check for a valid Win XP even in manual update. The early versions did not work very well and were easy to bypass. I fixed my old Win 95 box so that M$ never checked anything.
The activation "feature" of XP is the only security related thing M$ evr did that worked the way they wanted., and most of us consider it a bug.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
80186...yuck...Dos...yuck...
A 80186? That is really weird. As far as I know, the 80186 was only used for embedded applications, and never made it into a general-purpose PC.
Maybe it was a 80286?
But I know what you mean. My lab has an expensive ($50k), old (but functioning) instrument that is controlled by a PC running windows 3.1. The control software will not run on any other version of windows (3.0, 3.11, 3.11 WfW, 95, etc). So we're stuck with it.
I did take many ghost images of the hard disk though!
I agree that the average user doesn't want to look at the source code. I'm a Linux user, and I never look at the source code to my OS. However, I get so sick of the support argument. Have you ever actually called Microsoft Support? They're horrible. I've never had any solution come from Microsoft support. The last time I called Microsoft Support for assistance with a Services for Macintosh problem, they recommended that I don't use Microsoft's Services for Macintosh, and instead use a Mac product called 'Dave.' For this advice, they charged us an astounding hourly rate.
Also, the average user does not keep things running smoothly. The average user is so completely ridden with adware/spyware that their computers are hardly usable at all.
- "That's just the kind of fuzzy-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten."
Sharp PC4500 Laptops had an 80186 - mine also had a whopping 1.6 MEGS of ram, and the standard 20 meg hard drive :)
And even with the non-commercial offerings... Well, Fedora Legacy is still providing updates for Red Hat Linux 7.3, and I'm confident there'll be no problems finding updates for Fedora Core 1 for at least another three years.
I agree that Red Hat did a shocking job of explaning what was happening when they changed their product line and started Fedora, though.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews