13 ms·

Well this article doesn't seem very good. Not least because the author seems perfectly willing to not actually explain the detail, and then jump to conclusions.

Well this article doesn't seem very good. Not least because the author seems perfectly willing to not actually explain the detail, and then jump to conclusions. Having read the actual detailed article what seems to be happening is that some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware. But people were using those licenses to just put their deployments on general cloud services- which is not what the license was intended for. The license was intended for fixed, outsourced bare metal hardware. Basically, MSFT is just catching up to the fact cloud services exist and you're going to need a specific license if you want to run the software on the cloud. Now, apparently this author finds this surprising, but given that the license he's complaining about is an "on premises" license it sounds more like MSFT were being generous by letting customers use the licenses on outsourced hardware, and never intended it to be carte blanche for running your "on premises" license in the cloud - which is very obviously not on your premises. What it sounds like is happening at the moment is Amazon is running a shit tonne of MSFT software without any MSFT licenses. Which sounds pretty cheeky to me.

Someone1234 7y ago
You seem to think simply re-stating the facts is enough to dismiss the article. But you forgot to tell us WHY it is acceptable for Microsoft to charge their customers a premium for using their fully purchased licenses on a cloud provider of their choice rather than dedicated physical hardware. And why it is ok for Microsoft to create an artificial monopoly for these licenses via Azure Dedicated Host. Microsoft sold licenses that could be used this way, customers used them this way, and now Microsoft wants to double-dip asking their customers to pay twice just to actually use their already owned licenses. > What it sounds like is happening at the moment is Amazon is running a shit tonne of MSFT software without any MSFT licenses. Which sounds pretty cheeky to me. That's not what is happening. People are buying Windows Server licenses and running them on compute that they rent from AWS. Until this change, that was completely inside the terms of Windows Server licenses (if for no other reason that they've been pushing hypervisor-based Windows Server virtualization for almost ten years).
- belltaco 7y ago
  Why is it okay for Nvidia to disable parts of a fully working chip in order to sell it as a more popular and cheaper part? Why is it okay for them to disable features in the PC vs Workstation drivers on the same hardware that you bought? Why is it okay for Apple to legally restrict OS X from running inside a VM or on a PC? Welcome to price differentiation.
  - lurker458 7y ago
    applying price differentiation on a product that you already sold to double dip is pretty scummy
    - misterdoubt 7y ago
      Perhaps, but that's not happening here. The Windows license change doesn't retroactively apply to existing licenses.
      - Nullabillity 7y ago
        It does apply to existing customers as soon as they need to scale out. Well, unless they decide to pay down their tech debt and get out ASAP.
        FactolSarin 7y ago
        Maybe they shouldn't have used an on- premise lisence in the cloud in the first place
        NullPrefix 7y ago
        Maybe they should have used Wine in the first place.
        yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        Yeah, how dare they try to use the exact model they've been using for years, scaled onto rented hardware!
belltaco 7y ago
The change also applies only to the big four cloud providers: Microsoft, Alibaba, Amazon and Google. Any other cloud hosting provider, say Rackspace, can be used with on-premise licenses.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  That makes it even more anti-competitive, since it makes it readily apparent that they're leveraging one area (Server Licensing) to artificially stimulate another (Enterprise Cloud vis-a-vis Azure Vs. Azure). Hopefully the US Government doesn't deem Windows Server a monopoly or they're in deep trouble.
  - Clubber 7y ago
    I wouldn't think Windows Server is anywhere close to a monopoly, unless you define it narrowly, like Windows Server is a monopoly for Exchange installs or something like that.
    - Nullabillity 7y ago
      They're a monopoly for companies that are already locked into Win32 or Win32-specific applications.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Once again we have a definition of “monopoly” on HN that is nowhere near reality.
        420codebro 7y ago
        Wow real stumper - almost as if Microsoft has a monopoly on their own ecosystem. And Apple. Etc. Etc.
iforgotpassword 7y ago
I kinda agree, but then again why even make a difference between those two things? I get how you want to differentiate between home and business use, but this... Also as they pretty much turned a blind eye on this practice for years now they just created the perception that it is fine and legal. I absolutely can't blame people for getting mad at them changing their minds now. Either have a clear stance on it right from the start or deal with the backlash. That is, we still have to wait and see if/how much there'll actually be... Slightly related to this: it was quite remarkable how long it took Microsoft to understand and accept that one OS install doesn't equal one (physical) machine. Even back in the old days when you just wanted to have a master hdd image to clone to all your workstations there was no official way to do this. Third party tools did voodoo black magic after dumping the image to the hdd. So it's not that surprising it took them so long to react here... Dynamically spinning up as many identical Linux VMS as you want and have them execute some container? Maybe network boot them? Crazy talk in Windows land for a long time.
tedivm 7y ago
It's worse than you're describing- Microsoft is charging one licensing price if you're on their cloud but another price if you're on someone elses. This anticompetitive behavior is what we expected from Microsoft in the 90s and early 2000s.
- Dayshine 7y ago
  Yeah, they charge more if you're on their cloud. Isn't that kinda the opposite?
- zaroth 7y ago
  What about the license makes Azure specifically cheaper? Does it call out Azure specifically? Or rather, you can use the on-prem license in the cloud, but only on dedicated hardware? If so, Azure Dedicated Instances would be able to use that form of the license, but why not AWS which also has a dedicated hardware option?
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    From the blog post[0]: > Azure Hybrid Benefit for Azure only [0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/updated-licensing-rights-for-dedicated-cloud https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/updated-licen...
    - cwyers 7y ago
      Azure Hybrid Benefit is for licenses with Software Assurance. The change that the blog post keeps railing on about is for licenses without Software Assurance.
- Raidion 7y ago
  You say it like that and it sounds bad, but you say it like "Microsoft offers a discount if you bundle cloud and license spending" and it sounds pretty fair to me. Goodness knows there are a lot of other cloud options than Microsoft. If you're tightly coupled with one vendor you're gonna be at their mercy.
SmileyRedBall 7y ago
‘Well this article doesn't seem very good. Not least because the author seems perfectly willing to not actually explain the detail, and then jump to conclusions .. some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware’ Seems perfectly clear to me: “Microsoft has introduced a preview of Azure Dedicated Host, which provides a physical server hosted on Azure and not shared with other customers.”, ref Microsoft has introduced it's own dedicated hardware. “Alongside this new service, the company has made licensing changes that will make Microsoft software more expensive for some customers of AWS, Google and Alibaba.”, ref And made it more expensive for “running Windows Server on any cloud that isn’t Azure”. ref: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/05/microsoft_licensing_windows_clouds/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/05/microsoft_licensing...
ryanisnan 7y ago
If your license differentiates between running on a physical box of my own versus someone else's physical box (cloud computing), I don't want to use your software. I think most developers would tend to agree.
- naikrovek 7y ago
  Don't use it, then.
- orf 7y ago
  It's lucky for Microsoft that the people receiving and paying the bills are far removed from the developers.
- erk__ 7y ago
  Does that also mean that you don't want to use redis or MongoDB after the changes they have made to their license?
- tw04 7y ago
  I think you're going to run out of options pretty quickly outside of what Amazon writes in-house then. The alternative isn't a sustainable business model.
jiveturkey 7y ago
> Basically, MSFT is just catching up to the fact I very much doubt they are just catching up. This was planned for years (if not a decade). The thought process being, as everyone virtualizes their compute to the cloud, any cloud, make it easy for them to stay on their existing Windows license. Well, they couldn't prevent it anyway. So in fact, they actively encouraged it. This way you don't lose that customer forever (as they transition to Linux or other, but generally Linux). The customer is happy, the move is endorsed by MS, they only have to deal with the one transition and they can decide freely on cloud provider, which feels like freedom. Part of the plan being, hope the customer moves their Windows workload to Azure, with an expectation that it would be least-effort. Now that the bulk of the shift (to cloud) has occurred, differentiate the licensing. IMHO this is a trumped up complaint about change. Microsoft did in part bring this uproar upon themselves by making the scheme complicated, but at least part of that was unavoidable (given that they want to make moar monies). Please note: > Multi-tenant hosts are not affected. which is likely most uses. It's only dedicated hosting (and only for "listed providers") that are affected. And Azure is included. The apparent escape valve of Azure Hybrid Benefit isn't much of one ... you have to pay for the AHB and you have to have software assurance. The same as on the other providers. This is how they will (rightly) escape any claims of anti-competitive behavior. In a nutshell, for customers that care enough to want a dedicated (vs multi-tenant) host, which BTW Azure hasn't ever had before, that's the kind of customer that cares enough to closely mind their licenses. MSFT is now going to insist on collecting the annual software assurance fee from those customers. This is probably motivated by the ease of spinning up new cloud instances, vs new on-premise hardware. With cloud, it's oh so easy to exceed your paid-for license usage. At least if they force the software assurance fees, they collect a larger fraction of fees. TFA is a low information rant, and even declares itself as such: > The longer version is complex, nuanced, and exceeds my attention span
apercu 7y ago
Sorry, I'm not following why from a licensing perspective it matters if you are running on a bare metal server in your office, a virtual environment on a physical server you own in a co-lo, or on virtual servers you "rent" from a cloud provider.

Someone1234 7y ago

You seem to think simply re-stating the facts is enough to dismiss the article. But you forgot to tell us WHY it is acceptable for Microsoft to charge their customers a premium for using their fully purchased licenses on a cloud provider of their choice rather than dedicated physical hardware. And why it is ok for Microsoft to create an artificial monopoly for these licenses via Azure Dedicated Host. Microsoft sold licenses that could be used this way, customers used them this way, and now Microsoft wants to double-dip asking their customers to pay twice just to actually use their already owned licenses. > What it sounds like is happening at the moment is Amazon is running a shit tonne of MSFT software without any MSFT licenses. Which sounds pretty cheeky to me. That's not what is happening. People are buying Windows Server licenses and running them on compute that they rent from AWS. Until this change, that was completely inside the terms of Windows Server licenses (if for no other reason that they've been pushing hypervisor-based Windows Server virtualization for almost ten years).

belltaco 7y ago
Why is it okay for Nvidia to disable parts of a fully working chip in order to sell it as a more popular and cheaper part? Why is it okay for them to disable features in the PC vs Workstation drivers on the same hardware that you bought? Why is it okay for Apple to legally restrict OS X from running inside a VM or on a PC? Welcome to price differentiation.
- lurker458 7y ago
  applying price differentiation on a product that you already sold to double dip is pretty scummy
  - misterdoubt 7y ago
    Perhaps, but that's not happening here. The Windows license change doesn't retroactively apply to existing licenses.
    - Nullabillity 7y ago
      It does apply to existing customers as soon as they need to scale out. Well, unless they decide to pay down their tech debt and get out ASAP.
      - FactolSarin 7y ago
        Maybe they shouldn't have used an on- premise lisence in the cloud in the first place
        NullPrefix 7y ago
        Maybe they should have used Wine in the first place.
        yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        Yeah, how dare they try to use the exact model they've been using for years, scaled onto rented hardware!

belltaco 7y ago

The change also applies only to the big four cloud providers: Microsoft, Alibaba, Amazon and Google. Any other cloud hosting provider, say Rackspace, can be used with on-premise licenses.

Someone1234 7y ago
That makes it even more anti-competitive, since it makes it readily apparent that they're leveraging one area (Server Licensing) to artificially stimulate another (Enterprise Cloud vis-a-vis Azure Vs. Azure). Hopefully the US Government doesn't deem Windows Server a monopoly or they're in deep trouble.
- Clubber 7y ago
  I wouldn't think Windows Server is anywhere close to a monopoly, unless you define it narrowly, like Windows Server is a monopoly for Exchange installs or something like that.
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    They're a monopoly for companies that are already locked into Win32 or Win32-specific applications.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Once again we have a definition of “monopoly” on HN that is nowhere near reality.
      - 420codebro 7y ago
        Wow real stumper - almost as if Microsoft has a monopoly on their own ecosystem. And Apple. Etc. Etc.

iforgotpassword 7y ago

I kinda agree, but then again why even make a difference between those two things? I get how you want to differentiate between home and business use, but this... Also as they pretty much turned a blind eye on this practice for years now they just created the perception that it is fine and legal. I absolutely can't blame people for getting mad at them changing their minds now. Either have a clear stance on it right from the start or deal with the backlash. That is, we still have to wait and see if/how much there'll actually be... Slightly related to this: it was quite remarkable how long it took Microsoft to understand and accept that one OS install doesn't equal one (physical) machine. Even back in the old days when you just wanted to have a master hdd image to clone to all your workstations there was no official way to do this. Third party tools did voodoo black magic after dumping the image to the hdd. So it's not that surprising it took them so long to react here... Dynamically spinning up as many identical Linux VMS as you want and have them execute some container? Maybe network boot them? Crazy talk in Windows land for a long time.

tedivm 7y ago

It's worse than you're describing- Microsoft is charging one licensing price if you're on their cloud but another price if you're on someone elses. This anticompetitive behavior is what we expected from Microsoft in the 90s and early 2000s.

Dayshine 7y ago
Yeah, they charge more if you're on their cloud. Isn't that kinda the opposite?
zaroth 7y ago
What about the license makes Azure specifically cheaper? Does it call out Azure specifically? Or rather, you can use the on-prem license in the cloud, but only on dedicated hardware? If so, Azure Dedicated Instances would be able to use that form of the license, but why not AWS which also has a dedicated hardware option?
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  From the blog post[0]: > Azure Hybrid Benefit for Azure only [0]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/updated-licensing-rights-for-dedicated-cloud https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/updated-licen...
  - cwyers 7y ago
    Azure Hybrid Benefit is for licenses with Software Assurance. The change that the blog post keeps railing on about is for licenses without Software Assurance.
Raidion 7y ago
You say it like that and it sounds bad, but you say it like "Microsoft offers a discount if you bundle cloud and license spending" and it sounds pretty fair to me. Goodness knows there are a lot of other cloud options than Microsoft. If you're tightly coupled with one vendor you're gonna be at their mercy.

SmileyRedBall 7y ago

‘Well this article doesn't seem very good. Not least because the author seems perfectly willing to not actually explain the detail, and then jump to conclusions .. some customers buy "on-premises licenses" without mobility rights, and MSFT used to let them use those licenses on outsourced hardware’ Seems perfectly clear to me: “Microsoft has introduced a preview of Azure Dedicated Host, which provides a physical server hosted on Azure and not shared with other customers.”, ref Microsoft has introduced it's own dedicated hardware. “Alongside this new service, the company has made licensing changes that will make Microsoft software more expensive for some customers of AWS, Google and Alibaba.”, ref And made it more expensive for “running Windows Server on any cloud that isn’t Azure”. ref: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/05/microsoft_licensing_windows_clouds/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/05/microsoft_licensing...

ryanisnan 7y ago

If your license differentiates between running on a physical box of my own versus someone else's physical box (cloud computing), I don't want to use your software. I think most developers would tend to agree.

naikrovek 7y ago
Don't use it, then.
orf 7y ago
It's lucky for Microsoft that the people receiving and paying the bills are far removed from the developers.
erk__ 7y ago
Does that also mean that you don't want to use redis or MongoDB after the changes they have made to their license?
tw04 7y ago
I think you're going to run out of options pretty quickly outside of what Amazon writes in-house then. The alternative isn't a sustainable business model.

jiveturkey 7y ago

> Basically, MSFT is just catching up to the fact I very much doubt they are just catching up. This was planned for years (if not a decade). The thought process being, as everyone virtualizes their compute to the cloud, any cloud, make it easy for them to stay on their existing Windows license. Well, they couldn't prevent it anyway. So in fact, they actively encouraged it. This way you don't lose that customer forever (as they transition to Linux or other, but generally Linux). The customer is happy, the move is endorsed by MS, they only have to deal with the one transition and they can decide freely on cloud provider, which feels like freedom. Part of the plan being, hope the customer moves their Windows workload to Azure, with an expectation that it would be least-effort. Now that the bulk of the shift (to cloud) has occurred, differentiate the licensing. IMHO this is a trumped up complaint about change. Microsoft did in part bring this uproar upon themselves by making the scheme complicated, but at least part of that was unavoidable (given that they want to make moar monies). Please note: > Multi-tenant hosts are not affected. which is likely most uses. It's only dedicated hosting (and only for "listed providers") that are affected. And Azure is included. The apparent escape valve of Azure Hybrid Benefit isn't much of one ... you have to pay for the AHB and you have to have software assurance. The same as on the other providers. This is how they will (rightly) escape any claims of anti-competitive behavior. In a nutshell, for customers that care enough to want a dedicated (vs multi-tenant) host, which BTW Azure hasn't ever had before, that's the kind of customer that cares enough to closely mind their licenses. MSFT is now going to insist on collecting the annual software assurance fee from those customers. This is probably motivated by the ease of spinning up new cloud instances, vs new on-premise hardware. With cloud, it's oh so easy to exceed your paid-for license usage. At least if they force the software assurance fees, they collect a larger fraction of fees. TFA is a low information rant, and even declares itself as such: > The longer version is complex, nuanced, and exceeds my attention span

apercu 7y ago

Sorry, I'm not following why from a licensing perspective it matters if you are running on a bare metal server in your office, a virtual environment on a physical server you own in a co-lo, or on virtual servers you "rent" from a cloud provider.