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Comment by pianoben | Hacker News Reader

Two thoughts come to my mind.

One, this article and the project it covers will be good negotiating leverage against Microsoft's fee increases. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up winning back lower license fees and sticking with MS in the long run.

Two, what a boneheaded move on Microsoft's part, PR-wise. CERN is an internationally-respected research institution which is widely admired by the kinds of people who make purchasing decisions. Why poke the bear, especially when business is going so well?

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From a different point of view, I don't see using PR to have lower fees very ethical. It looks to me like "lower our fees, or we are gonna trash you in our PR, and you know we have a good reputation".

That seems something of a double standard, companies are encouraged to use any legal means possible to improve profits, but customers need to stay silent about poor terms?

The parent didn't encourage companies to use any legal means necessary. You can't know their stance about this.

What's unethical about "if you do something we don't like, we're going to talk about it"?

What would the more ethical alternative be? To just take the deal on offer or silently move on?

I don't think that really holds water. The ethical thing for the researchers is to drive down costs everywhere they can to get the most money spent on research. M$oft wants to maximize it's profits and is negotiating from a position of strength knowing that big enterprise integrations can't just say "f-this, were off to use ubuntu".

Funny how advice on this site is always "Charge what it's worth!" or "Don't be afraid to charge for your product!", unless of course, it's someone who's already made it, like Microsoft, and then it's the tired 20 year old "M$" meme again.

There is a difference between advice for a lifestyle business and critique of a fortune 50 company.

High end tech procurement is more like your average market stall haggling than you might imagine. It tends to be the middle ground that's most stable.

Have you ever negotiated in a contested deal with a big company?

They get way nastier than PR pieces.

I didn't read any trashing. Just a general note that the current commercial terms aren't sustainable for them.

I guess it depends on whether CERN merits academic status or not. If it does, then this is fine. If it doesn't then I agree.

It seems to me that CERN is a research institute but whether that is counted as an academic institution, from a licensing POV, is a different question

As somebody who has worked at research institutes in the US, this comes up a lot. Some companies say that an academic user must have an e-mail address ending in ".edu" (which in the US means a school or university), but others define it more broadly to include non-profit research institutes as well. It gets murky because many research institutes actually have grad students doing their projects there (even if they are officially enrolled at a university elsewhere).

The first of these certainly does happen, in this case though I suspect it may be a bit of both. When it comes to negotiation this will likely go both ways, the prestige and association of a project like CERN is worth something to large tech companies, as is being involved with the people and projects.

It's unlikely that they will be able to quickly or even ever move everything to new platforms, but with time there's a good chance they can move much of it. It will come down to the economics and time pressures of buy-in vs build-in.

Short term investment's need for ever growing revenue/profits. If they raise everyone's license costs 23% this year, investors will be happy. Then MSFT will have to raise their rates again next year.

Usually the salespeople get a quota that can only be met by either moving Azure or hitting some impossible software target.

It’s the usual, Oracle did something similar to CERN a few years back. Lock in and profit!

Did CERN manage to migrate away?

Back then we just paid, don’t know if this changed. Oracle and PL/SQL was deeply embedded, I don’t think this would be feasible. There were terabytes of beam data in Oracle DBs and lots of software relying on the dialect.

The court of public opinion is the way to get companies to do things these days.

Wish that was the case with Mozilla.

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