Microsoft Revamps Licensing Plans 356
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."
No Choice... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
inquiring minds want to know... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:In 10 years? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd like to upgarde to XP, but I absolutely will not tolerate product activation in something as mission-critical as an operating system. It's not an option for me. I refuse to permit my OS vendor from deciding on a day-to-day basis whether I'm going to be allowed to boot up my machine.
That seems to be OK for most folks, so I'm just going to put my tinfoil hat back on and go back to Win2K now.
10 years of support... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It was time. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's an improvement, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:In 10 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I don' see how... (Score:4, Interesting)
With Windows, you're locked down to MS' (pretty terrible) support.
Re:In 10 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:In 10 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
She said "yep, what we always had"
So, um (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Yes, in ten years, if not longer (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
Wow, this is soo insightful. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Is this the result of Linux or IBM? (Score:1, Interesting)
One question (Score:3, Interesting)
"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 [reuters.com] instead of the Yahoo link which suspiciously looks like pay-per-click partnership program URL?)
Re:One question (Score:1, Interesting)
Second that. Someone will get a big paycheck and exposure on Yahoo! TV tonight and Yahoo! Movies tickets for pointing to that referral Yahoo! News link. Last time I remember Yahoo! News paid $1.50 for each referred article reader.
Re:In 10 years? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yay for competition (Score:4, Interesting)
Its the so called law of the jungle. With the legal systems not able to control financially powerful organisations such as M$, then the natural reaction to this problem is for open source to become one of the only competitors to M$.
Unlike the courts, in competition such as this, the vast amounts of highly payed lawers cannot be of much use.
Place your bets...place your bets (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh oh, the Redmond Mind Trick! (Score:5, Interesting)
These are not the licensing changes you're looking for, move along.
XP Concurrent sessions? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Architectural Obsolescence? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
makes you wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Architectural Obsolescence? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:makes you wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Another nice support story... (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Re:makes you wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
snicker (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
MOD PARENT UP!!! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:In 10 years? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:makes you wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Most people on
Are IT people co-dependent? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:makes you wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
You should remember just how Microsoft took over.
All of those practices appeal to managers ("it is easier to manage Windows servers and palmtops if you already manage Windows desktops"), developers ("write once, run anywhere") and users ("if you know how to use win95, you can use WinXP"). (As geeks we all know there is devil in the details but those statements are largely true in the big picture)
Linux on the desktop is becoming the threat because that means it becomes credible to have Linux everywhere (servers, palmtops) (ie the same reasons why Windows spread like a virus :-)
The Linux companies are slowly doing some of the same things, but at a far slower rate, and IMHO far more stupidly (ahem RedHat, take a bow). But Microsoft never makes the mistake of underestimating their competitors, and these actions are consistent with them learning what lead to their own success and ensuring the same doors won't be wide open for Linux.
Re:certifications mean nothing (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:In 10 years? (Score:3, Interesting)
Microft
MS using MAC? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:In 10 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:makes you wonder... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is very true and one of the main reasons why I'm going with MS at my place of work. I don't know how the Java world compares but if you're a dotNET developer then there is an almost overwhelming amount of good stuff on MSDN. I've been watching some of the archived webinars and many really are useful. A lot of the newer MSDN topic areas such as 'Patterns and Practices' seem to be a genuine and good effort to lift developer skills and shake off the past where most code was probably in VB button click events.
Why not? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Probably... (Score:2, Interesting)
Use, hell. I write and maintain some very specialized DOS applications. I run dosemu on my Fedora Core 2 box to edit and compile them, actually.
My Bank runs DOS! (Score:4, Interesting)
The Bank's response: It runs, it prints, and it does not crash. So why bother?
Re:I don't get it. (Score:3, Interesting)
First, an off-topic question to the moderators: How can self-professed ignorance ("I don't get it.") be insightful?
Next, a response to the parent.
When corporations talk about "official support," they're looking for a couple of things that F/OSS can't give them:
Number one is standard CYA; if you do your own software support, then it's clearly your fault when things aren't working. The fundamental rule of succeeding in Corporate America is: find someone else to blame. You sort of get this with F/OSS, if your job consists of sending in bug reports and then sitting back and waiting for the maintainers to issue a fix, but how is this any different from closed source?
Number two is something people often overlook. When problems occur, corporations need to know when to expect a solution, so they can plan accordingly. That means they need fairly firm deadlines, and someone to intimidate if those deadlines slip. Just try to do that on IRC and see how far it gets you. Since most companies don't have the resources to have a coder on staff, support contracts are the only alternative.
Re:It's an improvement, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Only one server is every active at any given time
No; you said yourself that the backup may be synchronising data, ready to takeover in the event of the primary failing. If that's the case then the machine *is* in use, it's just not serving data to clients.
That doesn't make this new licensing scheme bad, it just means that it's not appropriate for your use (or ours, as it happens, as we tend to set things up as you describe too)
Re:Another nice support story... (Score:3, Interesting)
It was rare, but it did make into normal PCs. I used a Siemens PC-D [machine-room.org] during my education. It was a bit slow, had a non-standard keyboard, non-standard graphic controller, an on-board hardware debugger (which defaulted to german keyboard layout) and the BIOS was a bit weird.
Re:Wow, this is soo insightful. (Score:2, Interesting)
Hit - to drop to a console login. Login as root. Now you have a few options, depending on your knowledge of the system. In your case, run the X server config script (it's something like XFree86 or something. Type 'man XFree86' for a proper answer.) You should be able to change the settings on your mouse in there.
if you want to do it the real man's way (and I will admit that I'm not man enough to try this unless I really need to!) you can directly edit the config file itself.
And to be honest, I only learnt this after reinstalling Debian half a dozen times. It sounds like a waste of time, but I learnt more about computers during that process than I did in all the years of using a Windows box before.
Re:Why not? (Score:1, Interesting)
who cares (Score:1, Interesting)
In all the linux upgrades I did I have had three apps that did not work - they were all custom apps and we had the source and all we had to do was recompile because of gcc had changed/upgraded.
software is always changing and for businesses that are smart they should always be upgrading something. Linux is always improving - for me at least upgrading linux has been a no brainer - it works great and is easier to administer.
One other word is I cannot believe the 2.6 kernel - I have been watching tv editing huge video files and my swap has not even been used. - unbelievable!!! Microsoft - be afraid - be very afraid.