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MS Drops Licensing Restrictions from Web Server 2008
Channel Guy writes "According to a report from CRN, Microsoft plans to allow users of the Web Server SKU in Windows Server 2008 to 'run any type of database software with no limit on the number of users, provided they deploy it as an Internet-facing front-end server.' The previous limit was 50 users. Microsoft's partners expect the changes to go a long way toward making Windows Web Server 2008 more competitive with the LAMP stack, against which Microsoft has been making headway in recent months."
There are at least eight different "versions" of Windows Server 2008:, depending on what features are crippled:
This change only affects the crippling level on #8.
If you read netcrafts definition of a website you will find some sort of strange things. almost all the google sites are blogger sites, over half the IIS sites are myspace profiles and live.com blogs.
The recent decline in IIS and gain by apache is almost entirely myspace to facebook migration.
The other big factors are godaddy parking is IIS, most other parking domains are apache, and then there is the relatively small number of sites which are all the sites that generate all the content that you would actually want to connect to the internet for.
Netcraft is has a bit of a problem with figuring out what is a website. Is a myspace profile a website? No, but what if someone is running a music site off of their myspace profile and have it branded and put real effort into and is its own destination?
Do geocities accounts count as websites? most of them did get counted and when geocities popularity waned so did BSDs market share.
What if you wild card a domain name and have a script generate unique content for almost every possible hostname, and submitted tens of thousands of the hostnames of that server to netcraft? How many websites would that be? Some creative spamming by Microsoft or their enemies would make netcraft statistics pretty meaningless. Also Netcraft only reports on the front facing server which grossly understates zope and tomcats presence.
There are lies, damn lies, statistics, and netcraft website counts.
Work bio at MMWD
OS-X is very nice for the desktop, but I would stay away from it on the server side, not because there is all that much technically wrong with it, but because Apple don't seam to get the server market.
By hard earned experience with Apple server products I have learned that you can't trust them to support their products over long times. The all of a sudden discontinues products without any resonable migraton paths to the successr, if there even is a successor. E.g. they dicontiued A/UX and replaced with an Apple version of AIX that they then dropped totally in just a couple of years.
When they distribute updates they have more than once totally destroyed, customized settings, and the open source software that comes with the server version of MacOS-X is often incomplete or lacking in functionality compared to the same software on Linux or Solaris.
Chosing between Windows and Mac, I would choose Mac any day. MacOS-X is at least simple to use.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
You don't think jwz was advocating for Windows, do you?
http://www.jwz.org/doc/linux.html
Most large changes relate to registrars (e.g. GoDaddy) changing their infrastructure on servers serving pages for parked domains (as parked domains make up a rather alarming percentage of domain names).
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I have to take issue with this statement.
Let us assume a LAMP stack which comes via a support subscription (eg. RHEL). And lets assume variables such as customer support and pricing are equal, I would still go with the LAMP stack. I have experience with both, and I find LAMP to be easier to use yet much more versatile. A Microsoft web stack can definitely get the job done... but I find things easier to accomplish with LAMP -- I definitely don't work with Microsoft stacks without getting paid for it.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Not if you're using it with a Active Directory system with automatic login to an intranet ala Sharepoint...
I agree with your logic but MS doesn't do logic... they do licenses and IP... so all of their technology is set up on the premise that they need you to buy lots of licenses to do 'anything'...
though when you do cough up enough money, their integrated suites of software are pretty useful, as long as you need to do exactly what the software is capable of and nothing else.
As soon as you need to do something else, you'll either have to hire an extremely over-priced development firm, a team of developers and all the overhead of a new department - or wait until MS decides that enough of your peers want to buy the thing you need for it to be profitable to them.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Just FYI, Windows 2003 for Small Business Server was available in 2003, which would've reduced your cost figures immensively (around 1400US$ starting price (premium) including 5 clients, plus 700US$ for each additional 5 clients).
SBS Premium includes SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition, Exchange Server 2003, and runs on a single machine. SBS CALs are also valid for other Windows Server 2003 servers in your network, e.G. if you would've bought a Web Edition machine, you wouldn't need to purchase any CALs and run it either against a local SQL Server Express instance or against the Workgroup Edition on the SBS Server.
Back in 2004, Office Communication Server 2007 wasn't released, but right now it's a full blown voip solution from Microsoft (which works pretty well, and integrates nicely). It isn't expensive either, at around 1000US$ per Server, and around 20US$ per CAL.
I don't intend to change your mind, just wanted to show you that the stuff isn't as expensive as you're trying to make it. Also, if you're a development shop that sells application based on Microsoft Windows, you can apply to become an MS Partner, which costs around 1500 US$ per year, and gives you all the licenses you might want (for internal production use), plus an MSDN subscription.