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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."
Will people actually be running copies of Windows 2000, XP, etc. in 10 years?
-- n
And this is why Linux is good for you, even if you don't care about the actual software and are a Windows-only user.
IMO this is a sign that other OSs are legitimate competition. I suspect this was the reason for also extending Win98's lifecycle.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
This is going to help anyway, unless their liscence allows free access to the operating systems source code and allows them to modify it, Linux is still better.
Given the bad acceptance of Microsoft's licencing scheme in the IT, it was time Microsoft did something about it. It's not enough IMHO, but still.
What I like about current situation is that the appearance of solid competitors (around Linux) and the scrutinity of judiciary entities (namely EU), we might have a real free market again in the OS field. That would be great, no matter who the winner is. Free market is always better than a vorace monopoly, and I'd like to see real progress in the field, which can only occur in a competitive market.
I think the next few years will be very interesting, indeed. Imagine if we had as much offering in the OS field as in say the gaming field.
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 So the liscence is free IF you never use it? hmmm...
Probably a little bit of both. Personally, I find Windows 2000 stable enough not to bother spending cash and a little bit of time upgrading to XP.
If so, is that because they can't make enough new products (Longhorn >= 2007 ? ) or can't get people to migrate.
Yes. As software improves it gets harder and harder to improve it. As software improves people see less and less reason to upgrade.
It's called "maturation," which, for some reason, most propriatary software makers never saw coming.
KFG
Sasser & Co would eat you alive before you could even say "Hell, where's the Windows Update Button ?" or "Why is this crashing ? We installed the fix for the application 6 months ago!".
Hopefully MS will allow network connections for updates. It would probably be cheaper to have a license ready instead of burning the "Update DVDs Du Jour" just in case you need it.
Just my 5 €-Cents
"Microsoft Revamps Licensing Plans"
Such a headline always sounds like good news. Let me guess... This new Microsoft licensing plans will be good for customers, good for competition and especially good for free software including, but not limited to, GNU GPL, and there will be lots of positive feedback on Slashdot, am I right? Am I right? Please tell me I am! OK, I'll RTFA... Somehow I have a bad feeling, I don't know why... It must be that tin-foil hat and all that, I guess... *sigh*
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I imagine that the dead server would replace it as "cold".
At the very least, this legitimizes the DRP testing that regulated industries (ie Pharmaaceutical) are required to carry out annually.
In many cases these are full blown restoration of service off the corporate network.
It happens now, but at least it will hapen in compliance with licensing agreements.
in action.
All of this really makes me happy. If I am forced to use Microsoft products, then I have a decent shot at a better deal because of the FS/OSS products I make most use of today.
It hardly gets better than that. Thanks to everyone who has worked hard to get us this far. For everyone else, myself included, please consider contributing in some fashion. You can write docs, test, pass the word along, purchase some software and get a nice box, etc...
OSS: You get more than you contribute in return. How cool is that!
Blogging because I can...
This article seems to remind me of the same thing M$ has been doing for years. They drop prices, work out licensing deals with organizations (ala University of Maryland), give away stuff, etc just to get their product in your hands, on your network, and essential to your computing life. M$ is not dumb. They have alot of smart people all working towards the same goal.
Also I don't think linux pressure has anything to do with it. I'm just sick of their licensing practices period and I think that attitude is what is changing things. Who wants to pay extra money to have a server sitting around doing nothing? Not me. That being said I would rather use linux for core systems whenever possible.
Anyway I think alot of the posts so far are good especially the one pertaining to the updates on an offline server.
My well being does not depend on my slashdot score.
I've upgraded over a hundred computers to xp via network installation
You did check the hardware specs before hand, right? You didn't? Oh, well, I guess they were all newer machines then? Oh, you don't know?
Hmmm....
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
The problem is, slashdot doesn't know my name as I don't have an account here. In fact, I'm not even the same person that posted the parent message. Considering these facts it's pretty hard to make that feature work, don't you think?
No, I really don't think the bugs are there to drive the upgrade cycle. I think the bugs are they because they really don't give a shit. Shoddy workmanship. Not the fault, for the most part, of the programmers either, but of the entire aura of the software industry, reaching even into the training the programers get in college. A lot of OSS programers fall prey to this too I'm afraid and the majority of selftaught off the internet programers don't even know enough to know what they don't know, but defend their ignorance vehemently.
.
It all makes for a lot of crappy programing on all sorts of levels and there are certainly still all sorts of improvements to be made in all sorts of places.
But even given all that software is still maturing. A word processor is a word processor and MS word processors and their spawn hit their peak with 97. emacs and vi just keep working, and working, and working. .
No, I really think most of the propriatary companies really believed that by following their policy of only releasing upgrades in slow cycles well below the rate they were actually developing product they could extend the process for decades, relying on technology to outpace their own release cycle.
Yes, this has certainly played a role in letting OSS catch up and even pass their product in some cases.
I think some of the companies just didn't think about it at all. They were young and just got caught up in the whole fervor of the thing, ploughed ahead blindly and got surprised when software turned out to be just another technology business prey to all the laws of the real world.
Microsoft is a special case though. It's a company founded on a cult of personality more than anything else. I've never seen a company, except maybe early IBM, simply exude the personality of its founder more than Microsoft.
And Bill is one of these people who simply does not acknowledge other people as valid other people. He has a "right to innovate." He has a right to conduct business however he likes, because his like is what's right. We get to do what he says, when he says it because we don't share his rights.
So Microsoft simply thought they could make us upgrade forever without ever even considering that we might simply refuse. It wasn't in their world view that that was possible.
And OSS catching up and even surpassing their product in some cases (well, virtually all really. The best Windows programs don't come from Microsoft) is certainly playing a role in disquieting them. It rattles their whole view of cosmology.
Like the Protestant Reformation rattled the Pope.
OSS has its own problem with maturation though. It likes to press ever onward at increasing speed and yesterday's project becomes uninteresting.
Somebody has to do the last two percent of finishing up a project and tying a bow on it. In OSS this only seems to happen with the console programs.
KFG
(my laptop running XP hasn't crashed ONCE since my last reinstall)
.conf file(s) I need to edit to get my tv-tuner card to work in my linux box.
.conf files can destroy your box, doesn't guarantee its safety--and then makes you do it anyway like MS and editing the registry.
Last reinstall? Hah! How many have there been? Those two words say more than the rest of your message.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to go find out which
Let me know when you find a find a linux distribution that says editing
We'll be waiting....
And it seems to be working.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
(my laptop running XP hasn't crashed ONCE since my last reinstall)
Still waiting for them to fix the power supply so you can turn it on again, eh?? HA HA!
Now if you will excuse me, I have to go find out which .conf file(s) I need to edit to get my tv-tuner card to work in my linux box.
The other day I was working on an NT server and I was thinking "the usability of this thing is ZERO. the usability of Linux config files is pretty much zero too. Yet I can get the job done much quicker on Linux... I wonder why.." then it dawned on me... When I can't find something in a Linux config file, I use "grep -r". How the heck do you find things in the windows gui??
It's even more costly, if you have lots of inhouse software that refuces to run under the new OS. There are still people that use DOS-applications, because there's no replacement that would allow one to move data easily. When you have a small organization, it might not be possible to afford custom built software just to replace something that works.
Software should be free as in speech, but if we also get some free beer, all the better.
no imagination and reads too little science
.
Well, I'm noted for my imagination, and I've read all the major works of science fiction going back to Verne and Wells. I started reading Analog and F&SF when I was six, beginning with my mother's ten year backlog of both, so there's something like half a century of some pretty solid science fiction reading right there.
I've also read Asimov's science fact, which I adore, a good deal of Sagan, Gould, Weisenberg, Russell, Thorne, Shapely, et al, and god knows how many physics, math, chemistry, programing, etc. texts.
So, on the whole, I think I'm reasonably qualified to sort out the science from the fiction.
I certainly never said there wasn't still work to be done or progress to be made, but. .
It's pretty much time to stick a fork in the word processor. It's done.
KFG
I've never needed to edit the registry to install hardware. And I've installed some pretty off-the-wall hardware in my time (Windows user since Win95). Don't get me wrong, the registry is a mess (much better in NT based OS's), but it's not as bad as you make it out to be. And my WinXP on 3 different machines (one home-built, 2 laptops) runs just fine, no crashes, no reinstalls. It's not a perfect OS, but they've gotten a lot better of late.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
We just upgraded our NT4.0 servers last month... to Windows 2000. The new software we're going to be running isn't certified to run on Win2003 yet.
The reason we upgraded? New accounting software.
Microsoft seriously overrates the value of upgrading something that is working without having a compelling reason for doing so. Sometimes I wonder if they actually use their own software at all.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Monopoly$oft's use of the subscription-based
...
profit model to enforce the support issue,
especially combined with their DRM strategy.
It's 2008, and your M$ AS2K3 server has just
crashed. For the privledge of re-authorizing
your software keys, M$ now wants the 3 years
worth of subscription support paid for (that
you dropped in 2005), plus another 3 year
support subscription, now, it full. Oh,
and there is a software key recovery fee
of $10K per product to be paid for, as well
as a $1K per simultaneous user fee.
If you really need to keep your business
afloat, you had better be using this time
to develop a F/OSS replacement, because
Monopoly$oft WILL be screwing you when
you need their support the most
Looks like the moderators were unkind to you. Your post is relative and not a troll. The original poster states that he upgraded hundreds of PC's to XP. While the upgrade could have taken roughly that amount of time, the real issue is all the additional planning involved as well as the post upgrade support. Unless this guy is working with a single hardware configuration, the research for pushing the upgrade out must be done to make sure the systems can support the upgrade (minimum CPU, memory, etc... for the supported OS). You also should take into account that users could have personal data and/or applications on their PC (maybe the managers have a management application the other systems don't, the engineers have CAD, etc...). Applications must be tested on the new OS (you'd be in trouble if you upgraded only to find out that a critical application is incompatible). Data must be preserved (even if it's just bookmarks for their browser). The main point is that while the actual upgrade of the OS isn't difficult, the preparation and training are. Users tend to get a little upset when their PC changes. They become a bit possessive once they customize it.
Licenses are the olden day version of DRM. They're restrictive (if followed) and take away our right to do stuff with software we supposedly own (which we really don't. We just rent it).
How the hell did such licenses become so popular? Because there was no competition. Everyone was doing it so you had a choice. Use software with a restrictive license or don't use software. But we have alternatives now, so why does everyone still use software with restrictive licenses? Because the software became the standard (i.e. Microsoft).
People are shit-scared this will happen with DRM. But this article shows alternatives slowly starting to alter restrictive licenses. This is a Good Thing (TM) because if they can do it after such licenses have become the norm, they should be able to affect DRM and hurt it a lot.
More than 6 months ago. I'll admit that I had to reinstall because my computer had become somewhat unstable, but the fact that it no longer crashes tells me that the software I had running on it was more to blame than windows. Solution: Don't install buggy software.
On a somewhat related note, My webbrowsers in mandrake linux crash every 6 minutes. I am not exhagerating (or spellchecking). I have a pretty wierd motherboard (asus w/ raid) and video card (ati 9600 pro *cringes at linux support but is unwilling to pick video card based on OS I would rather not use as a primary (getting work done) OS*) so maybe thats partly to blame. Windows crashes every once in a while, less than once a day. Im planning on changing my motherboard when my first paycheck comes in but thats neither here nor there.
bit trollent
It's worse for a small company. Microsoft licenses are VERY expensive and Linux requires a lot of support to get up and going. If it works keep it is more the creed for a small company.
What exactly does that mean? How do you pull support of free software? What's keeping anyone from moving to Fedora or Debian? As another poster has mentioned, you can replace any part of any free system yourself anytime. Help is cheap and competent. Security seems like a non issue too.
Distributions like Debian make the version change as easy as apt-get upgrade. Fedora is moving in that direction, if it's not already there.
I've never suffered data loss due to changing software since changing over to Red Hat 5.1. The data grew from there through Red Hat 7 and then to Debian potato, woody and now sarge. I did this on two different computers, but it could just as easily have been one.
What kind of "support" did I need? Zero. How many support calls did I have make? None because I quickly learned that Google + LUG is a much faster way to get answers.
Before I knew what I was doing, I paid someone $50 to set something up for me. It was easy to find the help locally, even in 1998. If you live in a big enough town, you will have a magnet high school with a BSD or Linux lab and many cluefull people. University towns are crawling with CS students who also know what they are doing and need cash nights and weekends. When they graduate, they are worth their weight in M$ licenses and EULAs.
In the last six years, I've never had a security issue outside of Windows. This might be because I've continuously upgraded my software, but it still looks easier to protect old Linux boxes than Winblows. Even if I were so terribly lazy that I did not do security upgrades, I can still keep old machines from running dangerous services or make effective firewalls for them.
So, I don't understand the fuss. What trouble have you really had?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yes, but to a lot of us geeks and technophiles, this was the first we heard of it. Slashdot rarely breaks original material -- rather, it's a consolidator of important or interesting information. The great majority of time, the information is not highly time sensitive; that is, info a month old is still highly relevant. Slashdot does its job well.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
Apple is famous for not understanding the "enterprise" market. Their platform is cool, but they haven't a clue about how to support it in a large business environment, which is something Microsoft knows quite a bit about. Combine that with the fact that licenses for multiple tens of thousands of desktop machines adds up to heart-stopping-serious money, even at volume discounts, and you see why there is growing interest around Linux on the desktop.
Don't get me wrong, I lust after the newer Apple equipment. They are indeed the new benchmark for stable,high-performance systems. But I couldn't bring myself to pay their price, even before I started paying the IRS back. 8)
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
Microsoft listens to their customers allright... When there's money at stake. Competition from other platforms is clearly the reason they are making this change. They aren't a dying corporation, they simply don't have the monopoly they once thought they did. I know I just fed a troll here, but this troll indirectly brought up an interesting point.
> The improvements have been won thanks to GNU/Linux.
Hmm, I find it interesting that Windows has a way lower "Total Cost of Ownershop" than Linux, but still they lower their prices to try to compete with Linux. That doesn't make their TCO campaigns very credible, does it?