Hacker News Reader

Comment by ta17711771 | Hacker News Reader

Where do you purchase this?

I see people recommend this _all the time_ and yet as far as I know the only way to legally obtain LTSC is via a 45$/month subscription to MSDN. Is there some other avenue I'm not aware of? If not, then that price is absurd for a feature set that used to be available by default in Windows 7.

AFAIK it's only available through volume licensing, which means you can't buy a single copy (you need around 30 licenses minimum, I believe). However, I've heard stories of people bypassing this limit by buying 1 license for LTSC (~$300), and then 29 CAL licenses (a few dollars each) as a filler.

If you're not particularly concerned about licensing though, just pirate it.

The minimum volume license buy is 5 licenses. Any good reseller will sell you 1 copy of LTSC and 4 of the cheapest SKU in the catalog (usually $5-10 / ea) to get your volume license contract started. After that you can purchase piecemeal for 2 years before you need to fulfill the minimum purchase again. The licenses themselves are perpetual.

I don't like it, but it's not too hard to do either.

Until recently there was a free Bizspark program which granted you five MSDN subscription for two years. Apart from that, there is a Action Pack which comes with (among others) three MSDN subscriptions and ten Windows 10 Enterprise licenses for 500 USD/yr.

Do the Action Pack licenses allow for general use or is it limited like the MSDN licenses are?

Since Action Pack is a subscription, what happens to the licenses when you stop paying?

When I still used it ~5 years ago, there were additional conditions on Action Pack licenses. AFAIR your company had to generate 80% of income from software development or similar services to be eligible and licenses were for internal use only.

After ending the subscription there was a one year grace period to either obtain new license, renew subscription or remove the software. In BizSpark you got to keep the licenses, apart from MSDN subscription of course.

Your local BitTorrent store

Reply on news.ycombinator.com