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."
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.
"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
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.
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...
When the disaster strikes, and the software is enabled, will MSFT come knocking on the door with an invoice for the previously 'cold' software?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
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.
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...
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.
IT guy: Lets switch to linux, otherwise we're simply going to fall behind our competitors
MD: No way! We still have 3 years on our licensing with Microsoft, we can't just throw money away!
[in 3 years]
MD: Hey Microsoft have given us a new 40% discount for a 3,000 year licensing plan! We can't possibly move to Linux now!
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.
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
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.
"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."
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
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...
"Microsoft Revamps Licensing Plans"
Please tell me, "to revamp" is a verb from "revenge," isn't it? Why do I always have bad feelings when I read "Microsoft," "licensing," "competition" and "Linux" in the same sentence? I must be paranoid or something.
(By the way, wouldn't it make more sense if the link "as Reuters article suggests" actually pointed to the Reuters article instead of the Yahoo link which suspiciously looks like pay-per-click partnership program URL?)
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
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.
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.
With the number of recent stories about Microsoft changing their mind about something (the SP2 install story being the most recent), how long does everyone think it'll be before we see a retraction of this policy, with something along the lines of "Someone spoke out of turn again" being said?
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.
Well, it's a step in the right direction anyways.
Bob Wiley: Baby step to four o'clock. Baby step to four o'clock.
Good for disaster situations, but I'm sure a lot of people have already been using this "new" licensing scheme for a while now.
Any chance that we'll get the legal option to connect a thin client to an XP box without booting off the user on the console?
The only thing all versions of windows are missing is multiuser support. I'm sure I don't run my CPU at 100% throttle, yet nobody else can use my machine without one of us having to go for a coffee break.
Multi-User or Multi-Settings?
Beta Sucks
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...
1.) Just how much exactly is Microsoft afraid of Linux? How much marketshare does Microsoft percieve Linux to take?
2.) How will Microsoft know if its plugged into the network? As well as the fact that a server w/o updates or recent data (yeah, I'm sure you could use removeable storage for that, but there goes the TCO), will be pretty much worthless. If it takes 8 hours to get recent data on it, and install the past 6 months worth of updates, how useful is it really? In addition, I don't like the idea that a server may be "calling home" to confirm that it is not in use. Sounds like a setup to me.
3.) With the longer product life, is Microsoft realising that people actually don't want to upgrade their OS every 5 years, especially for mission critical devices?
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
But don't forget, hardware will be free in the future!!!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
2 logins.
Wow!
On the other hand, the multics operating system was doing better than that in 1965. Way to go Microsoft - only 40 years behind the cutting edge.
Once again /. breaks a month-old story.
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
If the servers have to be turned off until they are needed and the original servers are running Windows, how often do you think the backup servers be turned on?
I don't think Microsoft thought about that. And I'm certain they think their servers will stay online to compete with Linux. On top of that, I'm not certain I understand how an offline server is competing with Linux.
There's a simple question here:
Are they stupid or do they think we're stupid enough to believe this?
Get your hip-waders out folks, it's getting deep very fast.
And it seems to be working.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
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
That's funny. The last disaster recovery I was involved with kicked off with scrapping all of the hard drives. IIS, Exchange, and Windows 2000 Server were tossed and replaced with Apache and Sendmail on a couple of Mandrake boxes. Our network was lightning fast after that upgrade. It took a complete and utter failure of both the primary and secondary domain controllers for us to realise how stupid keeping the MS machine oiled is.
one of the reasons i've adopted gentoo on production servers
;-)
syncing with two months delay and only selected packages (against my own portage tree), i'm still running 'up to date' system, and i don't need to think about 'another big update'
as long as gentoo officially exists, at least
since i have started, there were already two releases of mandrake and two releases of fedora core, so it has been worth it
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
Sounds like MAC (Microsoft Ass Covering). The reason is two fold.
1. Since all those people who have software update contracts with MS have basically gotten squat from them in the way of software this may pacify those business who purchased the plans. Better yet it may cover the ass of the IT department who said purchasing those plans would pay for itself in the long run.
2. It provides a band-aid, even though it would not help that much, for the glut of worms and viri that have cost businesses money, data, lost employee hours and customers. More than likely if a system administrator was stupid enough to let his system get infected in the first place he would probably infect the backup server when he went to recover the files.
Even though both of these things would really help MS in the long run, at least in the PR department, they still have to add a bunch of stipulations to getting the software. I think Microsoft would be happier if they got the PR and the stipulations meant that only 1 or 2 people were eligible to get the free software. They also blew a really good chance of helping to dispel the truth that their OS is full of security holes by allowing those with pirated copies to download the "more secure" SP2, but they quickly jerked that back and gave about the lamest statement to come from a software company to the press about it. Who knows, it could be a smart move if SP2 is not as secure as MS has been claiming it is.....they can just blame the pirates or linux or both.
Microsoft is used to shooting itself in the foot but lately they seem to like emptying the whole clip into instead of just a single shot. It makes me wonder who is behind all this, Gates or Ballmer?
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.
As benevolent as Bill is being with this, when are they going to release the source code?
This sig no verb.
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.
Frankly, any machine that uses a motherboard that supports the Intel 440BX chipset is ready to run Windows 2000 Professional.
Win2K Pro--once you install Service Pack 4 and all current security patches--is actually a very nice operating system for business applications and Internet access. I myself run Win2K Pro (SP4) on a home-built system that uses the Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with a Celeron "A" 500 MHz CPU with 384 MB of RAM and all programs run decently fast.
Another big advantage of Win2K Pro is the fact that software driver support for PC hardware is nothing short of superb. On a fast enough system with USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394 external connections (which are supported in Win2K since there is plentiful third-party driver support for these connections), Win2K is actually a pretty good platform for editing files downloaded from digital still cameras and MiniDV/MicroDV digital camcorders.
It's no wonder why Win2K Pro is still much-liked in the corporate world.
The Bank's response: It runs, it prints, and it does not crash. So why bother?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
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.
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
> 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?