Star Ballmer: Licensing Problematic, But Don't Expect Any Changes
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Oct 2009 17:50 UTC
Microsoft Software licensing. As home users, it's already an incomprehensible mess of legalese that nobody cares one bit about. However - we home users have it easy. The situation for business users and people managing IT departments is even worse (proprietary software, mostly, of course). Microsoft is a major culprit in this regard, and while the company acknowledges that the situation is messy, they claim they can't really do anything about it.
E-mail Print r 0   · Read More · 14 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/h71
Permalink for comment 387840
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[2]: cant break the piggy bank
by WorknMan on Mon 5th Oct 2009 23:48 UTC in reply to "RE: cant break the piggy bank"
WorknMan
Member since:
2005-11-13

The question one should also ask is whether one is willing to give up an ounce of freedom for convenience - for the sake of not having to read a book and learn a skill, is it worth the price in the long run?


That depends on a lot of things. For example, if it's just me involved, and there's a $30 proprietary app that's a ton easier to use than a free (as in speech one), I'll probably go for the former. But if the $30 app is $3,000, then I'd have to reconsider. Either way, the functionality of each app vs how much functionality I need will also factor into my decision. If paying $3,000 will help me get my job done in half the time as the alternative (even when I'm fully trained on the alternative), I might just decide that the cost is worth it.

Similarly, if I run a company that employes 500 people, how long is it going to take to get everybody up to speed with the new program(s)? Etc, etc.

How many companies have gone Microsoft everything and are now regretting that decision because their whole business is absolutely so reliant on Microsoft that any move would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming?


I think that's kind of a strawman, because if you invest heavily in any technology, whether open or closed, it's probably going to be prohibitively expensive and time consuming to migrate away from. Just because you implement open standards/open solutions doesn't mean it's not going to cost you a sh*tload of time/money if you need to migrate to something else in the future. For example, I read somewhere on this site that the Konquerer developers wanted to migrate away from KHTML as the renderer and switch to Webkit, but the app is so dependent on KHTML, it wouldn't really be practical to try and switch to WebKit. Hence, even though the solution they're using is open, they're still sort of stuck, unless they decide that the migration is worth the cost in time/money.

Sure, going with one vendor for your infrastructure has it's drawbacks, but it also has its advantages. For example, if you have Linux servers with a LAMP stack (or perhaps, in the case of the company I work for, Oracle instead of MySQL), it's easy for different vendors to point fingers at each other when something breaks, as I have witnessed happening on numerous occasions. However, if you're using multiple solutions from the same vendor, you know who's responsible.

I'm not saying that's the way everybody should go, just that the discussion is not as cut and dry as you make it seem.

Edited 2009-10-05 23:51 UTC

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 2