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Comment by jackfoxy | Hacker News Reader

For an operation the size of Jet the licensing of Windows servers is trivial. Without looking very hard I found a Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard - 64-bit License for $574.94. That's a one-time cost. There are ways to get it even cheaper. Maybe expensive for a hobbyist, but not much of a consideration for a company in production.

Companies with a lot of MS licenses have different options available, but this gives you an idea of the scale of the cost.

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Software that is licensed per-server has a higher burden than just the license's purchase price: you have to actually keep track of those licenses so that you can plan and optimize license capacity (even if you have a site license) along with real things like server and network capacity. To me, as someone who works exclusively in open source environments, that is a heavy burden and I don't buy software that is licensed per-machine.

To get an idea of the difference in overhead costs I think it's helpful to look at Amazon's pricing between un-licensed Linux and licensed Windows instances. An m3.2xlarge instance with Linux is $0.532/hr whereas the same instance with Windows is $1.036/hr. That is a pretty big difference.

I'm not certain, but I'm guessing the difference boils down to two costs for Amazon:

  1. The cost from Microsoft of a license of Windows
  2. The cost of dealing with licensing Windows
  3. The cost of support from Microsoft

52% cost overhead does seem a bit high, and I bet you could do better than that yourself, but I also don't think it is trivial. Just looking around to figure out the cost of licensing things for this comment was draining.

The cost spread also no doubt has some "because we can" spread built in as well. (Which is entirely proper, IMO. Their customers are getting benefit from the freedom to elect Windows and are paying for the benefit.)

Careful, Win server licensing has a lot of paths / pitfalls that a single base license may not cover (#5) http://blogs.technet.com/b/volume-licensing/archive/2014/03/...

Holy crap !

"1 – Does my Multifunction Printer need a CAL?

Yes, if the multifunction printer is connected to a Windows Server network. A multifunction printer accesses server software to; receive an IP address, to receive a job, to communicate that the job is finished, etc"

So if your printer gets a DHCP address from your windows server, the printer needs a CAL !

And that's the #1 item they list.

And then there's #5 (which you mention) which has the caveat which could mean you need a CAL for anyone on the internet accessing your web server.

Securing Windows Server licenses might be trivial, but believe me, automatically managing an infrastructure consisting a cluster of Windows servers is a pain in the ass compared to its Linux/FreeBSD counterparts (Azure might have helped here a little bit, I don't know, but I still suspect it would be easier to run a UNIX infrastructure.)

What about licenses for developers to develop software to run on that server? What about licenses for things like deployment software and Microsoft-centric VCS? What kind of database are you going to run? MS-SQL?

To paraphrase the toy story meme at the bottom of the article - SOFTWARE LICENSES. SOFTWARE LICENSES EVERYWHERE.

I would suspect that they are gold partners and therefore get MSDN licences for all their devs and TFS for free.

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