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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."
"Microsoft Revamps Licensing Plans"
Microsoft had no choice really. It was either extend their tech support, or watch many people turn to Linux when they next upgrade.
This just delays that, probably until longhorn where the choice between upgrading or Linux is to be made, in about 2 years.
3dinfo@maficstudios.com
Does this mean that they don't think they can keep up the 'a new version every 3 years and you will migrate' strategy? If so, is that because they can't make enough new products (Longhorn >= 2007 ? ) or can't get people to migrate.
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
That's a step in the right direction. But, I am not a big fan of that type of licensing. I ran into several applications that used this same logic. The problem is that we architect our services for automatic failover. So, the backup server must be available on the network at all times, and when the criteria for failover are met, it instantly takes over. It may even by synchronizing data in the background all the time.
Only one server is every active at any given time, but both need to be running. Some licenses allow for this. But, it's obviously much harder to enforce licensing limitations in this model. It almost has to be an honor system, unless the application is fully HA aware and can ensure only one is active at any time.
I got a tech support ring that a printer was not responding on Thursday.
Ancient printer on top of a locked cabinet. Noone around could find a key and aside from the door in the front there was a power and cat5 cable coming out from a hole in the back.
After about 10 minutes w/ my Gerber ripping the cabinet open I discovered a 486DX running a PC-DOS print server.
Pushed the reboot button on the front of the case and to my shock it actually booted back up again (old PC HD's have a tedency not to spin back up). Tested it and it printed fine.
Pushed the cabinet back up to the wall and chuckled to myself. Made a note in our ticket system and called it a day.
Just a note: There's alot of shit out there running that sometimes the IT department doesn't even know about. I wouldn't doubt if there are a few other of these PCDOS print servers and prolly a few 3.1 machines around.
In corporate land, they may well be.
We replaced a horrible mix of Win95 and Win98 with Win2K in 2001. There is still a bit of Win95 around, but it is dying slowly.
We are looking at Longhorn coming out in 2006 (maybe) or 2007 (probably) or 2008 (possibly). If Longhorn comes out in 2007/8 - we would not even consider upgrading until 2009. If there is no driver to change, then we would push further; Longhorn will mean new PCs, which jacks up the cost again. I could easily see a scenario where we are happily running Win2K in 2010. We might be getting a bit itchy by 2014...!
99% of our users need email, simple office and a browser. If Win2K does the job (and it pretty much does)...then what is the incentive to drop $20 million on new PCs and a new OS roll-out? And yes, some form of Linux desktop in about 2007 looks pretty attractive to me...
What you're saying is that
1. Microsoft isn't going to make people play for licenses of Windows that they aren't using
2. Microsoft isn't going to force upgrades anymore, at least not exactly.
Gee, how altruistic of them.
When it comes to budget, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rules the day. Companies would prefer to keep using the same computer systems forever, if they did the job. And I cannot say that's really a wrong attitude.
Of course, at many companies, the attitude is "even if it is broke, don't fix it unless it's stopping production outright". I just spent two weeks in a rather insane upgrade-a-thon at a customer, because they got bought by a larger company, and their new corporate IT department nearly had a heart attack when they saw the state of their systems. Many computers were stilling running Windows 95. Their main server was running Novell NetWare 4.11. These products are ten years old, unsupported, obsolete, and flat out broken. Win95 can't even get a DHCP lease without three patches (Y2K bugs). Oh, and a fleet of ten megabit unmanaged repeaters. And dead anti-virus software. And missing the disks for the backup software. And...
When corporate deployed their anti-virus software to this site, it darn near exploded. Over 8000 infected files on one PC alone. Their WAN guys were screaming bloody murder about all the worm traffic coming from this site.
It was great fun. For sufficiently small definitions of "fun".
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The only thing Microsoft could do to improve their software is open their source code? Amazing.
.conf file(s) I need to edit to get my tv-tuner card to work in my linux box.
I'll bet the guys in Redmond are slapping their foreheads as they read this post thinking, "All this time we have been doing things like making the Windows more stable (my laptop running XP hasn't crashed ONCE since my last reinstall) and supporting all kinds of wierd software and hardware, and making it easy to use. What we should have done is be more like Linux. That's easy to use and supports almost every component ever made, right?"
I don't know what is more sad, that somebody bothered to post this drivel, that somebody modded it up, or that people actually believe it.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to go find out which
bit trollent
As usual, they make a big deal of changes that are complete bullshit. Like there were people who were thinking, "Gee, I wish I could build a redundant server in case we ever need it, but that would mean buying an extra license or violating our existing license. I better just hope nothing happens to our primary server."
These are not the licensing changes you're looking for, move along.
Chemical company, has a big, proprietary machine specially made to run some simples mixes-and-test in an automated manner.
:
Damn thing breaks, refuses to start the procedure...
reboot gives nada...oki, I have to move myself to that lab and see for myself.
80186...yuck...Dos...yuck...
No doc, cryptic error message from the (also) proprietary software...
Call the company that made this (still exists ! yeah !!!) and they tell me they don't have ANYONE in their organisation that has any sort of experience with that old beast... and that If I am ready to wait, they can have the documentation out of deep storage in just under a week...YUCK!
BUT !!! they also have a name and phone number in their file about a guy that seem to be a specialist on the hardware...
Maybe there IS an IT Gos somewhere, smiling at me...?!?
After a quick phone call, I have some shocking news
1/ The guy is dead (god bless...) at a nice 85.
2/ The guy was the former head of the Lab...yes, the Lab I was trying to service. He took retirement some 10 years ago, and was kindly making maintenance to his former company, being the one that ordered and used the machine in his time...
ordering a full replacement machine is in the 5 zeros order....
=> I now have a nice undergraduate CS Student that is building an interface with a more modern machine (PII something I found ready for the trash bin), using Linux and the docs that came from the builder...
It might even have a GUI 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
One of the first "real" adoptions of Linux (like 1993-1994) on a corporate scale was a company that makes elevator controllers. Their motivation was quite simple: they need to be able to serve the elevator controller, in situ, *in 50 years*. They can't trust any company to do it for them, so they stashed away all the source code, all the tools, *AND* several computers on which the tools can be built.