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."

Comments

Eight different versions of Windows Server

[Animats]

There are at least eight different "versions" of Windows Server 2008:, depending on what features are crippled:

1. Windows Server 2008 Standard, $999 (with five Client Access Licenses, or CALs);
2. Standard without Hyper-V, $971 (with five CALs);
3. Enterprise, $3,999 (with 25 CALs);
4. Enterprise without Hyper-V, $3,971 (with 25 CALs);
5. Datacenter, $2,999 (per processor);
6. Datacenter without Hyper-V, $2,971 (per processor);
7. Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems, $2,999 (per processor); and
8. Windows Web Server 2008, $469.

This change only affects the crippling level on #8.

Re:Google

[micheas]

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.

Re:Still have to pay for the OS

[unoengborg]

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.

Re:Still have to pay for the OS

[Clover_Kicker]

You don't think jwz was advocating for Windows, do you?

http://www.jwz.org/doc/linux.html

Re:Still have to pay for the OS

[foniksonik]

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.