Use linux 
Yeah, remember, FOSS is only free if your time isnāt worth anything.
Not exactly 100% true, but labour costs and the time costs do need to be taken into account when youāre looking at these things.
And I say this as someone who purchases software from Oracle. If youāve ever bought anything from Oracle, youāll know that they make Microsoft look like the salvation army. But if I were to try to do the things here with cheaper products, weād end up spending a lot more in the end.
If you are paying full price for any Server license from MS, you are paying too much or your MS rep is a moron.
This is purely anecdotal but it is what I have been told by my local MS evangelists.
āā¦ as if 17 billion bytes simultaneously cried outā¦ā
Umm, aināt that supposed to be 16 billion bytes?
Brilliant insight ā now I know why developers tell marketing people not to comment on code. That is, assuming that the insights of marketing people on code are on par with Jeffās diatribe on the evils of marketing.
Without a doubt marketing people are prone to over segmenting markets, and this tendency grows exponentially with the amount of profit to be gained by said over-segmentation. A good thing developers never overcomplicate things and make them seem more complicated than they actually are. Never seen a developer give a business person a bulls**t estimate of level of effort on a task to either buy time, or get out of doing a boring task. Never.
People have jobs. They do them and sometimes doing them well means customers pay money. If you buy that server upgrade youāve just proven that the MSFT marketing people are doing their job well.
Thanks for doing a good job on SO ā Iāll keep buying it.
Joel tought us a nice lesson about consumer surplus and software pricing, you might want to take a look at it:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html
(that was back when he bothered to write nice essays :-))
It has been very handy to me trying to explain my bosses why we should use different pricing schemes, while trying to keep it simple.
I would have liked to see the Zappa album cover version of āWeasels ripped my fleshā
The real question is how many lawyer-hours does it cost an enterprise to assure compliance with MS licensing terms versus OSS licensing terms.
Donāt US universities do the same thing - tuition fees are astronomical, but are then reduced on a case by case basis for applicants through grants and financial aid, to match what the parents can actually afford?
Honestly, I wouldnāt be surprised if some simple registry settings controlled whether you could use all the installed memory or not. Iāve seen similar tactics from Microsoft before.
http://oreilly.com/news/differences_nt.html
P.S. I love my MS stack but sometimes things just go too far.
I think you got it all wrong - it may be just flipping a bit now but how did the support for 48 gigs get there in the first place?? By developing and testing code which all takes time and money.
Look at it this way. You develop some software, you release a single version at a single price. It works great but some big businesses need feature X. So you develop feature X - investing a wack of time and money.
Now do you roll the new feature into the single version? No - because you will have to raise the price for everyone - even people who donāt want the new feature.
So you split the versions - a cheaper standard version and a more expensive āAwesomeā version that has the new feature. Now everybody wins. People who donāt want the new feature pay less and you get remunerated for the development work by selling the higher priced version.
Now internally the software may be the same and only a bit flip enables the new feature - but that doesnāt mean that feature should be given away for free.
I want to reiterate want a bunch of others have said. Youāve made a false comparison in this post. Hosting has directly measurable costs that scale with the amount of data, number of users, and number of connections. The bigger your site the more electricity, disk space, processor time, even real estate your site uses. These are real world measurable things. More users using your site costs your host more money.
You using more memory in your machine does not cost Microsoft anything extra. It did cost Microsoft a lot to cripple it though. Iāve been part of a project that created a cripple-ware version of a product and it cost a lot of money and time to cripple it.
brilliant post and so true. when you say thisā¦ "The money is irrelevant; the expensive resource here is my brain. If I choose open source, I donāt have to think about licensing, feature matrices, or recurring billing. I know, I know, we donāt use software that costs money here, but Iād almost be willing to pay for the privilege of not having to think about that stuff ever again. " ā¦ thatās what Iām always telling my clients is the āhandling chargeā of using licensed software. In a large organization, it is a very real, and VERY large frictional overhead because even when ācheapā it has to go through business case, approval, purchasing, asset registers, maint. fees, etc etc. Then thereās the procedure for getting support (which you will need because the product is opaque and doesnāt work). It all requires the whole Dilbert department just to administer. Saving all that overhead is the biggest win in choosing open sourceā¦ not just saving the license fee.
Yeah, thank God that Linux only comes in one flavor.
He was probably referring to OS X server, which has only one version.
Iāve liked the licensing where you pretty much can use unlimited, but it bugs you in certain ways all the time when youāre using beyond your limitā¦ so you put in 48 GB of RAM, it uses 48 GB but tells you that hey youāre licensed for 32 GB in the event logsā¦ and maybe displays something on startupā¦ and maybe in the sys tray every few hour. Of course weāre talking about a server here, so how often do you really access it via console/remote desktop, so this probably wonāt work too well on preventing usersā¦ but itās step towards ādonāt make me thinkā.
Note: the system where I saw licensing implemented that way was a process data historian (kind-of like SQL Server but really quite different)ā¦ it would implement some restrictions but still could use the system. Vital to know though that the system was really costly compared to what most people think of for server software costs, but the industries that use it can afford itā¦ it also helped that this historian seriously held a very large percentage of market share too.
This exact problem is what pushed a previous employer of mine to switch from a completely Microsoft-centric software stack to a Linux & Postgres stack a couple of years ago. My boss bought an 8-processor server from a failed .com at auction, got the thing home, and then looked up how much it would cost to install Windows and MSSQL on the thing (think per-CPU licensing costs). After his blood pressure came back down, we crunched some numbers and it turned out that it would be cheaper for me to spend the next six (or maybe it was eight) months working full-time to get our system ported over to Linux and Postgres than it would have been to buy versions of Windows and MSSQL that would actually use all eight processors. Cheaper by something like a factor of two. Now, granted, I was being underpaid at the time, but not that badly.
Of course, as we all know, TANSTAAFL always applies: there was pain involved in porting our system over, and we had to learn a lot about Linux in a very short period of time, and there were some gnarly integration hassles due to the rest of our company being Windows-only. I also vividly remember spending a couple of extremely unpleasant days trying to get whatever version of SuSE I was using back then to play nicely with the weird-ass SCSI RAID backplane this particular server used.
But you know what? If you were to add up the total cost of the time I spent dealing with those hassles and the pain, it still wouldnāt have come close to the purchase price for eight CPUs worth of MSSQL. And, when we eventually outgrew or first server and had to set up a second instance of our system at a different location, guess what we didnāt have to do? Yup, you guessed it: shell out multiple tens of thousands of dollars again in Microsoft tax. Really, it was one of the biggest no-brainers Iāve ever seen in person. Note that none of this has anything to do with the relative quality of Windows vs. Linux or MSSQL vs. Postgres- thatās not a game I really want to get into. All Iām saying is that the cost difference is such (especially for smaller companies with shallow pockets) that I have a hard time seeing a reason to pay the extra money.
Two words : Ubuntu Server
I ran into a similar problem using Windows XP Standard Edition when it suddenly began rejecting additional connections into our small project teamās file-server. I donāt deny their right to set pricing schemes, but the problem I have coming from the Mac / Linux world is that I donāt expect to be asking the right marketing-driven questions. Questions like āDoes this version allow connections only limited by system resources?ā or āDoes this version actually address all the memory a 64-bit addressing space should allow it to address?ā seem like nonsense, along the lines of asking if you want your processor to support both addition AND subtraction.
In our case, since the server was essentially operating as just a file-server, it got wiped and replaced with a Debian install, which we still use. The value-add of the MS software stack didnāt make up for the (Iāll go ahead and say it) psychological trauma of not being able to trust the system to conform to my arbitrary standards of functionality.
If youāre looking for an FOSS altenative to Basecamp, we have a clone you can install. Check it out at our site, itās free, or find me in twitter as michokest