Microsoft to support startups with free software/support
microsoftstartupzone.com
microsoftstartupzone.com
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite with MSDN Premium is usually $10,939. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/subscriptionsc...
That is a lot of software.
Kudos to Microsoft.
With Microsoft, after 3 years, you have to start paying for everything. With the software I've listed above, I'll never be forced to cough up money for it, and I'll never be subject to vendor lock-in.
Microsoft's initial price of $0 looks attractive, but you'll never own the software so you have to factor in the Total Costs of Non-Ownership: they want to make you dependent on them so they can jack up their prices.
Most startups use Free Software running on a GNU/Linux platform, and Microsoft's BizSpark program is clearly a response to this. But people don't use Free Software because it's cheap, they use it because it's better -- which is why BizSpark will fail.
The BizSpark process also seems overly bureaucratic and there are questions as to what actually you are allowed to do with the software MS provide -- for my full review to BizSpark see http://www.includipedia.com/blog/2008/11/05/microsoft-bizspa...
Free is nice, but we still pay for commercial software. We spend $600 for each license of IntelliJ because it woks better for us than Eclipse.
Also, in the end you want to build something people want.
If you have a bunch of engineers who are good at .Net, why not use the Microsoft stack to get that done quickly? Go out and build!
True: own can mean the ability to do with it as you will, or the ability to exclude others from it. With FLOSS you can do the first but not the second.
If you have a bunch of engineers who are good at .Net, why not use the Microsoft stack to get that done quickly
Indeed why not? Microsoft may be the best a platform if that's what your experience is in. Though it seems to me that most innovations in software technologies seems to be Open Source these days, e.g. Rails, Django, Clojure. The only closed source thing seems to be C#.
Though maybe I am biased because the Microsoft/.Net side of things is something I don't follow -- for example I've no idea if there's a Microsoft/C# equivalent of Ruby on Rails.
I have a friend who does a lot of C# and he claims there are some really interesting things going on over there. F#, automatic parallelization in the CLR, FP goodness in C#.
Meh, I'd rather deploy and use open tools and platforms.