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Comment by ShamelessC | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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