8 ms·

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 cu

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!
- slips 7y ago
  If one wishes to price like that, they do it from the start. We have more than enough history to show that you don't offer customers something for one price scheme and then change it in the middle to get even more money out of them. It doesn't work and only causes problems.
  - misterdoubt 7y ago
    This applies to new licenses purchased starting in October. It's not "in the middle."
- geerlingguy 7y ago
  Just to clarify, Apple does allow you to run macOS inside VMs provided they are running on Apple hardware. But yes, the EULA restricts running macOS on non-Apple hardware.
- DannyB2 7y ago
  > Why is it okay for . . . . It's not okay.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    Yeah, pointing to annoying, anti-competitive, customer-unfriendly practices the happen to exist doesn't make them "okay". It only means companies aren't prohibited by law/contract from doing them. Only in that sense are they "okay"
    - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
      Why is it not ok to disable some features on a device and sell it cheaper? How is this anti-competitive? How is this customer-unfriendly?
      - drucik 7y ago
        Because giving something more to the customer would not cost them anything. There used to be this belief that things are worth as much as the cost to produce them + some margin for the maker. And things were made so they will benefit their consumers. Unfortunately more and more companies these days look for ways to get not what something is worth but to get from consumers as much as possible, to squeeze them like lemons.
        ZeroBugBounce 7y ago
        It's a business decision which will make them more money. In Universe A they sell only the most powerful version of the product for 1x price and them make some money. In Universe B they sell the most powerful for 1x AND a slightly less powerful version for 0.9x price and they make MORE overall profit. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. There are customers who will want to pay less and not need the most powerful product. I fail to see how the company in Universe B is morally worse than those in Universe A. One could argue they are superior, in that they offer more choices.
- slowmovintarget 7y ago
  Regarding Nvidia, is this just a straight disable of full-function chips? Some vendors will sell chips with reduced function because it permits them to sell chips with defects that disable only specific functions, where the rest of the chip is fine.
  - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
    > ... is this just a straight disable of full-function chips? > Some vendors will sell chips with reduced function because it permits them to sell chips with defects that disable only specific functions, where the rest of the chip is fine. If one is able to get a less expensive, albeit less powerful, device for cheaper, is there any difference?
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      Right, take the Intel i486 chips. Intel sold 486SX, and 486DX chips, plus a 487DX. Now, as far as an end user was concerned, the 486DX was a CPU as you'd think of it today with integrated FPU (relatively novel at the time in desktop) the 486SX was missing an FPU (still fine to run workloads that were at the time predominantly integer only) and the 487DX was an upgrade to make your 486SX have an FPU But that was never what was really going on, all these were the same CPU design, except that when yield rates for the FPU weren't so good Intel disabled it and sold those as the 486SX. When sales of the 486SX outstripped supply of dodgy FPU 486DXs Intel removed the FPU altogether from new ones. Meanwhile the 487DX wasn't "upgrading" anything, it just disabled the 486SX and replaced it with a full CPU.
      - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
        So?? A customer is buying X features for Y dollars. It doesn't matter if certain other features are there and disabled, because that's not what the customer paid for. Software does this all the time as well. Say you get the first three levels of a game for free. You have to pay to get an unlock code for all ten levels. Is it unfair that you really got the whole game for free and that you are being kept from accessing it unless you pay? If you get the features you pay for, then the transaction was legitimate. Fin.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Well, there's "okay" in the legal/contractual sense and there's "okay" in the customer-friendly, long term interests of the company. This move may be the former, but not the later, and MS seems to be banking on gaining more revenue for these licenses & switches to Azure than they lose when some customers decide to stick with AWS but move away from Windows. Either way, some group of customers, however small, will choose to move away from Windows, so their long term market share will be smaller. Is this "okay"? Depends on which way MS has placed its bets.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    One thing this article gets right is that this seems to be a move back towards the good old "Where do we want you to go today?" Microsoft of yore.
- cbhl 7y ago
  My read on this is that this is really "price simplification". If you want to run Windows on the big public clouds, you used to have three options: (1) rent a VM with a license bundled into the per-minute/per-hour rate (2) bring-your-own-license on "dedicated hardware" (3) pay for software assurance Looks like Microsoft is now phasing out (2), so now basically anyone who isn't large enough to have software assurance has only one price: the all-inclusive per-vm per-hour/minute rate.
- slang800 7y ago
  This is just whataboutism. Other companies doing bad things doesn't make Microsoft's bad things any less bad.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  Well, it isn't okay for NVIDIA to try and charge me tens of thousands for a quadro card instead of just letting me virtualize my Geforce 1080. In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and I use hacks to get my 1080 support virtualization and pass-through. It's also not okay for Apple to restrict what hardware I can run their software with. I have run hackintoshes and OS X VMs. I voice my support and concern for these vendors' policies appropriately by using my wallet. The policies you listed are not okay.
  - NullPrefix 7y ago
    > In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and I use hacks to get my 1080 support virtualization and pass-through. In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and buy Radeon. Vote with your wallet.
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      As I mentioned in a sister comment, it's far more nuanced than that. NVIDIA makes the better card for the money, so they get my hardware sales. That's where it ends, however, as I do not partake in their ridiculous licensing scheme. If and when AMD finally catches up, I have no problem making the switch. That is voting with my wallet.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    That is not voting with your wallet. Voting with your wallet would be not using anything from NVidia and Apple to start with, including the business opportunities it might entail.
    - Supermancho 7y ago
      > Voting with your wallet would be not using anything That's RMS thinking. If you don't mind, I'll expand on it. Voting with your wallet includes not paying into third party workarounds because their existence depends on the bad actors to exist (in some cases).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
toomuchtodo 7y ago
> 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. Because they wrote and own the software you are interested in licensing. If you don't like the license, don't run the software. Microsoft has the leverage that open source projects like Redis and Elastic wish they had on AWS (and why those open source projects are updating their licenses to combat AWS' profiting off of their work). As someone else has mentioned, Apple restricts how and where you can run OSX/MacOS. I don't think thats going to stop people from using OSX/MacOS out of principle (typo corrected).
- letstrynvm 7y ago
  s/principal/principle/g If they stop people making money from it, it's not open source any more.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    If properly licensed, it’s still open source. Free as in speech, not as in beer.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      According to most peoples definitions if you can't do what you please with it or make a derivative product and do what you please with THAT I cannot imagine why you believe its free as in speech anymore.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
relaunched 7y ago
Are you arguing against a business being able to update their licenses, as they see fit, to adjust to major changes in the market? That doesn't seem reasonable. As a consumer, if you don't like it, you can always migrate away from Windows.
letstrynvm 7y ago
It's acceptable because enough people are going to accept it. Spend a bit of time using a FOSS stack and stop creating anything new on the legacy proprietary stuff, it will solve itself.
libria 7y ago
What irks me about this is I like to ride as close as I can to the fantasy of SDE == 8 hours of problem solving. Meetings, sprint ceremonies, interruptions I've come to deal with as baggage that comes with the territory. But when I have to blow the dust off my olde Microsoft Licensing Nits and Pitfalls Tome and play license-lawyer again, that really sucks the life out of me. Windows Server is a great product and I want to pay great money and use it without worrying about where in the cloud it's floating. Why even cut a distinction about what kind of machine is hosting your product, virtual or metal? Nevermind even talking about who owns that machine being an issue.
- secabeen 7y ago
  > Windows Server is a great product and I want to pay great money and use it without worrying about where in the cloud it's floating If that's the case, just use the windows license that's provided to you when you spin up an instance with your cloud provider. This is only for people using dedicated instances.
gameswithgo 7y ago
its ok for microsoft to do anything they want with pricing. its ok for customers to complain about anything they want too.

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!
slips 7y ago
If one wishes to price like that, they do it from the start. We have more than enough history to show that you don't offer customers something for one price scheme and then change it in the middle to get even more money out of them. It doesn't work and only causes problems.
- misterdoubt 7y ago
  This applies to new licenses purchased starting in October. It's not "in the middle."
geerlingguy 7y ago
Just to clarify, Apple does allow you to run macOS inside VMs provided they are running on Apple hardware. But yes, the EULA restricts running macOS on non-Apple hardware.
DannyB2 7y ago
> Why is it okay for . . . . It's not okay.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Yeah, pointing to annoying, anti-competitive, customer-unfriendly practices the happen to exist doesn't make them "okay". It only means companies aren't prohibited by law/contract from doing them. Only in that sense are they "okay"
  - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
    Why is it not ok to disable some features on a device and sell it cheaper? How is this anti-competitive? How is this customer-unfriendly?
    - drucik 7y ago
      Because giving something more to the customer would not cost them anything. There used to be this belief that things are worth as much as the cost to produce them + some margin for the maker. And things were made so they will benefit their consumers. Unfortunately more and more companies these days look for ways to get not what something is worth but to get from consumers as much as possible, to squeeze them like lemons.
      - ZeroBugBounce 7y ago
        It's a business decision which will make them more money. In Universe A they sell only the most powerful version of the product for 1x price and them make some money. In Universe B they sell the most powerful for 1x AND a slightly less powerful version for 0.9x price and they make MORE overall profit. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. There are customers who will want to pay less and not need the most powerful product. I fail to see how the company in Universe B is morally worse than those in Universe A. One could argue they are superior, in that they offer more choices.
slowmovintarget 7y ago
Regarding Nvidia, is this just a straight disable of full-function chips? Some vendors will sell chips with reduced function because it permits them to sell chips with defects that disable only specific functions, where the rest of the chip is fine.
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  > ... is this just a straight disable of full-function chips? > Some vendors will sell chips with reduced function because it permits them to sell chips with defects that disable only specific functions, where the rest of the chip is fine. If one is able to get a less expensive, albeit less powerful, device for cheaper, is there any difference?
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    Right, take the Intel i486 chips. Intel sold 486SX, and 486DX chips, plus a 487DX. Now, as far as an end user was concerned, the 486DX was a CPU as you'd think of it today with integrated FPU (relatively novel at the time in desktop) the 486SX was missing an FPU (still fine to run workloads that were at the time predominantly integer only) and the 487DX was an upgrade to make your 486SX have an FPU But that was never what was really going on, all these were the same CPU design, except that when yield rates for the FPU weren't so good Intel disabled it and sold those as the 486SX. When sales of the 486SX outstripped supply of dodgy FPU 486DXs Intel removed the FPU altogether from new ones. Meanwhile the 487DX wasn't "upgrading" anything, it just disabled the 486SX and replaced it with a full CPU.
    - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
      So?? A customer is buying X features for Y dollars. It doesn't matter if certain other features are there and disabled, because that's not what the customer paid for. Software does this all the time as well. Say you get the first three levels of a game for free. You have to pay to get an unlock code for all ten levels. Is it unfair that you really got the whole game for free and that you are being kept from accessing it unless you pay? If you get the features you pay for, then the transaction was legitimate. Fin.
ineedasername 7y ago
Well, there's "okay" in the legal/contractual sense and there's "okay" in the customer-friendly, long term interests of the company. This move may be the former, but not the later, and MS seems to be banking on gaining more revenue for these licenses & switches to Azure than they lose when some customers decide to stick with AWS but move away from Windows. Either way, some group of customers, however small, will choose to move away from Windows, so their long term market share will be smaller. Is this "okay"? Depends on which way MS has placed its bets.
- mcguire 7y ago
  One thing this article gets right is that this seems to be a move back towards the good old "Where do we want you to go today?" Microsoft of yore.
cbhl 7y ago
My read on this is that this is really "price simplification". If you want to run Windows on the big public clouds, you used to have three options: (1) rent a VM with a license bundled into the per-minute/per-hour rate (2) bring-your-own-license on "dedicated hardware" (3) pay for software assurance Looks like Microsoft is now phasing out (2), so now basically anyone who isn't large enough to have software assurance has only one price: the all-inclusive per-vm per-hour/minute rate.
slang800 7y ago
This is just whataboutism. Other companies doing bad things doesn't make Microsoft's bad things any less bad.
soulofmischief 7y ago
Well, it isn't okay for NVIDIA to try and charge me tens of thousands for a quadro card instead of just letting me virtualize my Geforce 1080. In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and I use hacks to get my 1080 support virtualization and pass-through. It's also not okay for Apple to restrict what hardware I can run their software with. I have run hackintoshes and OS X VMs. I voice my support and concern for these vendors' policies appropriately by using my wallet. The policies you listed are not okay.
- NullPrefix 7y ago
  > In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and I use hacks to get my 1080 support virtualization and pass-through. In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and buy Radeon. Vote with your wallet.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    As I mentioned in a sister comment, it's far more nuanced than that. NVIDIA makes the better card for the money, so they get my hardware sales. That's where it ends, however, as I do not partake in their ridiculous licensing scheme. If and when AMD finally catches up, I have no problem making the switch. That is voting with my wallet.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  That is not voting with your wallet. Voting with your wallet would be not using anything from NVidia and Apple to start with, including the business opportunities it might entail.
  - Supermancho 7y ago
    > Voting with your wallet would be not using anything That's RMS thinking. If you don't mind, I'll expand on it. Voting with your wallet includes not paying into third party workarounds because their existence depends on the bad actors to exist (in some cases).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

toomuchtodo 7y ago

> 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. Because they wrote and own the software you are interested in licensing. If you don't like the license, don't run the software. Microsoft has the leverage that open source projects like Redis and Elastic wish they had on AWS (and why those open source projects are updating their licenses to combat AWS' profiting off of their work). As someone else has mentioned, Apple restricts how and where you can run OSX/MacOS. I don't think thats going to stop people from using OSX/MacOS out of principle (typo corrected).

letstrynvm 7y ago
s/principal/principle/g If they stop people making money from it, it's not open source any more.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  If properly licensed, it’s still open source. Free as in speech, not as in beer.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    According to most peoples definitions if you can't do what you please with it or make a derivative product and do what you please with THAT I cannot imagine why you believe its free as in speech anymore.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

relaunched 7y ago

Are you arguing against a business being able to update their licenses, as they see fit, to adjust to major changes in the market? That doesn't seem reasonable. As a consumer, if you don't like it, you can always migrate away from Windows.

letstrynvm 7y ago

It's acceptable because enough people are going to accept it. Spend a bit of time using a FOSS stack and stop creating anything new on the legacy proprietary stuff, it will solve itself.

libria 7y ago

What irks me about this is I like to ride as close as I can to the fantasy of SDE == 8 hours of problem solving. Meetings, sprint ceremonies, interruptions I've come to deal with as baggage that comes with the territory. But when I have to blow the dust off my olde Microsoft Licensing Nits and Pitfalls Tome and play license-lawyer again, that really sucks the life out of me. Windows Server is a great product and I want to pay great money and use it without worrying about where in the cloud it's floating. Why even cut a distinction about what kind of machine is hosting your product, virtual or metal? Nevermind even talking about who owns that machine being an issue.

secabeen 7y ago
> Windows Server is a great product and I want to pay great money and use it without worrying about where in the cloud it's floating If that's the case, just use the windows license that's provided to you when you spin up an instance with your cloud provider. This is only for people using dedicated instances.

gameswithgo 7y ago

its ok for microsoft to do anything they want with pricing. its ok for customers to complain about anything they want too.