4 ms·

Before you've launched you can use the development versions. Once you've moved into an office the licensing cost doesn't really matter relative to other expens

by kogir 19y ago

Before you've launched you can use the development versions. Once you've moved into an office the licensing cost doesn't really matter relative to other expenses. We spend 13 times more money on cell phone contracts per month at Loopt than we do on MS software licensing (Office, Exchange, Windows Server, VS 2008, SQL Server, etc). Payroll is astronomically more. If the relatively minuscule amount of money you're saving from not licensing MS software makes a difference, I'd argue that you have bigger problems :) There definitely are valid reasons not to use the MS stack, but cost isn't one of them in most cases. We've saved enough time by using it to more than cover its cost. [Edit] For more on cost, look into the Service Provider License Agreement. You pay per month and only for what you used. http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/licensing/default.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/licensing/default....

deleted 19y ago
[deleted]
ericb 19y ago
That's fine and I even like using .net, but at any point MS can pull a VB6 "not supported" on any technology or part of your stack while it has known vulnerabilities and you can't do anything but chew on it. How can you even put a cost on that?
- baha_man 19y ago
  I agree with your main point ("don't be a sharecropper" [1]), but as for the VB6 example, I don't think this is particularly convincing. It's not like VB6 users haven't had enough time to move over to VB.NET, and if they don't want to, they can still create applications using VB6. Existing VB6 applications are not suddenly going stop working because Microsoft isn't officially supporting VB6. What does 'support' mean anyway? [1] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
  - ericb 18y ago
    Actually, a previous company I worked at does have to move away. They have what they believe was one of the largest VB6 apps anywhere. It had its own embedded VBA as well. Now they have an enforced rewrite, and yes, it didn't mean it stops working that day, but they have licenses for VBA which they pass on to customers which DO expire (as in, they can't keep selling their product!). Now they have to move years of work and history to something new. So yes, real companies are real screwed by the decision. If Microsoft applies the same practice to ASP.NET some day, and a buffer overrun exploit is found, what are your alternatives?
    - baha_man 18y ago
      I guess Wasabi is a pretty good idea after all. May I ask if this company you used to work for has now embraced open source? [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html
      - ericb 18y ago
        Yes. They migrated most of the app to Java and made it web-based. Eclipse plugins and java for extensibility are going to replace the VBA.
chaostheory 19y ago
costs may not be the biggest problem, but what about the freedom to make changes to the source (to fix a bad exploit, add a feature, ...)? I still remember the telecom, I used to worked for, being burned by them; we had to pay x thousand dollars for a pre-release patch/bug fix for their black box software... Speed and quality of evolution/innovation is another factor. MS generally doesn't like open source (their sourceforge clone is a start, but really doesn't go far enough.), and it took forever for MS to catch up to open source with LINQ (and polish it). The same goes for their unit testing and ANT-like deployment tool. (Yes, NHibernate and NANT have been there; but MS pretty much snubbed them instead of embracing them.) At the end of the day the MS copy machine is fast, but not as fast (or good) as the open source movement.
- paulgb 18y ago
  > it took forever for MS to catch up to open source with LINQ Sorry to go off-topic, but what were they catching up to exactly? I wasn't aware of anything LINQ-like in open source (not that I'm always aware of these things).
  - wanorris 18y ago
    Actually, some of Microsoft Research's Haskell experts have done work to take the concepts from LINQ and port them to Haskell, because it's a cool idea that didn't exist there. Taking monadic combinators and applying them to the problem of generalized querying is indeed something that hadn't been done before. There are various slick data access techniques available in open source, but LINQ is not a knockoff of any of them.
    - chaostheory 18y ago
      imho I still feel LINQ is a knockoff and a really late one (years late). to MS's credit LINQ does bring a lot of improvements; mainly in shorter, more concise syntax
      - wanorris 18y ago

by kogir 19y ago

deleted 19y ago

[deleted]

ericb 19y ago

That's fine and I even like using .net, but at any point MS can pull a VB6 "not supported" on any technology or part of your stack while it has known vulnerabilities and you can't do anything but chew on it. How can you even put a cost on that?

baha_man 19y ago
I agree with your main point ("don't be a sharecropper" [1]), but as for the VB6 example, I don't think this is particularly convincing. It's not like VB6 users haven't had enough time to move over to VB.NET, and if they don't want to, they can still create applications using VB6. Existing VB6 applications are not suddenly going stop working because Microsoft isn't officially supporting VB6. What does 'support' mean anyway? [1] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
- ericb 18y ago
  Actually, a previous company I worked at does have to move away. They have what they believe was one of the largest VB6 apps anywhere. It had its own embedded VBA as well. Now they have an enforced rewrite, and yes, it didn't mean it stops working that day, but they have licenses for VBA which they pass on to customers which DO expire (as in, they can't keep selling their product!). Now they have to move years of work and history to something new. So yes, real companies are real screwed by the decision. If Microsoft applies the same practice to ASP.NET some day, and a buffer overrun exploit is found, what are your alternatives?
  - baha_man 18y ago
    I guess Wasabi is a pretty good idea after all. May I ask if this company you used to work for has now embraced open source? [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html
    - ericb 18y ago
      Yes. They migrated most of the app to Java and made it web-based. Eclipse plugins and java for extensibility are going to replace the VBA.

chaostheory 19y ago

costs may not be the biggest problem, but what about the freedom to make changes to the source (to fix a bad exploit, add a feature, ...)? I still remember the telecom, I used to worked for, being burned by them; we had to pay x thousand dollars for a pre-release patch/bug fix for their black box software... Speed and quality of evolution/innovation is another factor. MS generally doesn't like open source (their sourceforge clone is a start, but really doesn't go far enough.), and it took forever for MS to catch up to open source with LINQ (and polish it). The same goes for their unit testing and ANT-like deployment tool. (Yes, NHibernate and NANT have been there; but MS pretty much snubbed them instead of embracing them.) At the end of the day the MS copy machine is fast, but not as fast (or good) as the open source movement.

paulgb 18y ago
> it took forever for MS to catch up to open source with LINQ Sorry to go off-topic, but what were they catching up to exactly? I wasn't aware of anything LINQ-like in open source (not that I'm always aware of these things).
- wanorris 18y ago
  Actually, some of Microsoft Research's Haskell experts have done work to take the concepts from LINQ and port them to Haskell, because it's a cool idea that didn't exist there. Taking monadic combinators and applying them to the problem of generalized querying is indeed something that hadn't been done before. There are various slick data access techniques available in open source, but LINQ is not a knockoff of any of them.
  - chaostheory 18y ago
    imho I still feel LINQ is a knockoff and a really late one (years late). to MS's credit LINQ does bring a lot of improvements; mainly in shorter, more concise syntax
    - wanorris 18y ago