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Comment by JonoW | Hacker News Reader

I'm not in a startup or anything, but consider this; cloud computing is gaining momentum fast, and lots of startups will use cloud platforms like EC2, AppEngine, Azure etc.

The one thing about this change is that traditional licensing concerns go away. If you use Azure, you are paying by usage, so Windows licenses aren't in play. I guess my point is that the fear of launching a startup and having to face spirling license costs (for using MS products) is going to decline as more people adopt cloud platforms.

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Plus: If you go Azure where will you develop? Will some nice M$ guy install Visual Studio in the cloud and you will use remote desktop? Where will you test? No local dev servers, really?

Besides that, Azure is NOT usage payed, Azure is an approximation to that I would call scalable server rental. You pay by time and size, not by use. Maybe that explains Azure's momentum, they're getting things right and discouraging people by having expensive/inadequate prices. I hope they get it right soon, and that they start billing by usage.

I do .Net at an agency and I like it but it's amazing how much noise there is in the Microsoft ecossystem.

I'm still waiting for some nice L1nux dude to come setup all my free linux servers for testing...

I would imagine the license costs for dev tools for a startup are neglible. If you run Azure you would setup test/staging instances and tear them down when not in use, again because of scale, I would imagine that cost is negligible.

As for usage costs, doesn't Azure use the same model as all the others, e.g. EC2, in that cost = compute hours (i.e. instance running) + data transfer + storage? So if by usage you mean ultra accurate per CPU millisecond billing, then I don't anyone does that? Would be great though. Happy to be proved wrong though, I'm no expert on this...

I agree that the dev tools license costs for a startup are/should be negligible, I was just pointing that Azure isn't a substitute for a dev environment (and it's licensing costs).

I also think that the problem of the production environment costs is a good one to have, nobody should fear to start a business because of them. If you can't solve that problem it means you have the wrong business model or really bad engineers.

Oops my bad, I tought others did the billing by CPU load instead of by hour.

Plus: Compared to salaries, license costs are negligible.

Exactly....for all this FUD about licensing costs, if that's the difference between make or break, or affects your profitability in a major way, then you have a lot bigger problems than your licensing cost.

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