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.