6 ms·

The licensing costs for VS.NET, MSQL, and related products are a rounding error compared to the cost of salary paid to a 3-7 man team. Using open-source tools

The licensing costs for VS.NET, MSQL, and related products are a rounding error compared to the cost of salary paid to a 3-7 man team. Using open-source tools to save a few dollars is a sure sign of either incompetence or inexperience, and a soon-to-fail project.

robocat 15y ago
The costs are significant for a ramen profitable startup. For example production licences for MSSQL are not cheap. Each virtual machine for a dev is a problem. For a small startup, the cost is the time it takes to try and understand your licencing agreements - it wastes a lot of time...
- powertower 15y ago
  If it takes a developer so much time to understand the licensing terms, or to activate a Microsoft product, ... that it cuts into their production time, they don't need to be messing with anything other than PHP.
  - dextorious 15y ago
    You mean the language that powers the biggest social website of all time, Facebook, plus around 40% of the web? What exactly have you built in .NET that is greater?
    - powertower 15y ago
      That's turned out so well for Facebook that all they kept of PHP was the syntax (too much of it to get rid of it, and esay to find people that know it) and threw away the rest. And the other 40% of the web ... well, it's cheap and has low barriers to entry. That does not mean it's great.
      - dextorious 15y ago
        """That's turned out so well for Facebook that all they kept of PHP was the syntax (too much of it to get rid of it, and esay to find people that know it) and threw away the rest.""" For one, PHP (any language actually) is it's syntax and libs. So, that they "threw away the rest" is not an argument against PHP. People also run Rails on different rubies (JRuby/Rubinious/Ruby EE etc), so what? And they "threw" those for performance reasons, not for some better, purer language. If they had enough problems with PHPs performance to write a C++ compiler for it, you think they would have faired better if they started with something like Rails? Second, yeah, with multi billions revenue and nearly a bln users, yeah, I'd say it turned out pretty well for them. Proves that you can get pro --it doesn't get any more pro than FB in the web business-- without using expensive tools or the language du jour. """And the other 40% of the web ... well, it's cheap and has low barriers to entry. That does not mean it's great.""" There are Drupal/Wordpress sites that are among the best of the world... I don't know what you mean by "cheap" in this context. Is whitehouse.gov cheap?
        powertower 15y ago
        > with multi billions revenue and nearly a bln users, yeah, I'd say it turned out pretty well for them. If you want to attribute the lions share of success of Facebook to PHP, rather than the social effect and being in the right time in the right place, or other work put into it, that's fine with me. But I'll still disagree. > they "threw away the rest" is not an argument against PHP. If replacing the backend (compiler, libs, etc) because it's so buggy and does not scale at all, is not an argument, than nothing will be ... and I'm going to stop here and let this die.
azakai 15y ago
> The licensing costs for VS.NET, MSQL, and related products are a rounding error compared to the cost of salary paid to a 3-7 man team. Not for a pre-seed startup. In that common situation, software licensing costs can be by far the biggest cost you have. > Using open-source tools to save a few dollars is a sure sign of incompetence, inexperience, and a soon-to-fail project. Saving a few dollars in return for tools that are on average of similar quality - sometimes better, sometimes worse - is in no way like what you just described.
- powertower 15y ago
  > Not for a pre-seed startup. In that common situation, software licensing costs can be by far the biggest cost you have. In that situation, it's almost free-of-charge from Microsoft with their BizSpark (and similar) programs.
  - azakai 15y ago
    And as already mentioned by others, the problem is that the procedure for getting software through that (and other confusing programs) is convoluted. For a startup, messing with that is a distraction when there are equal-quality tools available by simple download.
    - powertower 15y ago
      If you have personal experience with this please share it. The other people in this thread basically said it was great except for one individual who had a problem with a host that would not allow user serials. > when there are equal-quality tools available by simple download I suppose the keyword is when or if. I which case that becomes true.
      - azakai 15y ago
        > If you have personal experience with this please share it. The other people in this thread basically said it was great except for one individual who had a problem with a host that would not allow user serials. Are we reading the same thread? Pretty much everyone agrees that MS licensing is convoluted and bothersome. >> when there are equal-quality tools available by simple download > I suppose the keyword is when or if. I which case that becomes true. Good software can be proprietary or open source. These days, neither is better than the other overall. You need to make a specific choice in each case.
dextorious 15y ago
"""The licensing costs for VS.NET, MSQL, and related products are a rounding error compared to the cost of salary paid to a 3-7 man team.""" 1) You keep using these words: rounding error. I don't think they mean what you think it means. There are startups, and successful ones, that have the tiniest of budgets. People literally survive on ramen and faith. For those kind of companies, the costs are not a rounding error -- and there's often no salary or minimal salary paid to the 3-7 man team initially, while they still have to have some servers and development tools. 2) It's not just the licensing costs. Even for a team with tons of cash that makes them negligible, depending on a stack fully determined by some other company is not a good idea. Startups rewrite stuff all the time, use different technologies when they find out the old doesn't fit nicely enough, etc. You can't be dragged down because you have written all your code in a proprietary stack for each and every component...
- powertower 15y ago
  > 1) You keep using these words: rounding error. I don't think they mean what you think it means. I've used those words once. > You can't be dragged down because you have written all your code in a proprietary stack for each and every component... No. But you can be dragged down with buggy, poorly engineered, and badly integrated tools.
  - azakai 15y ago
    >> You can't be dragged down because you have written all your code in a proprietary stack for each and every component... > No. But you can be dragged down with buggy, poorly engineered, and badly integrated tools. And that has nothing to do with whether they are proprietary or open source.

robocat 15y ago

The costs are significant for a ramen profitable startup. For example production licences for MSSQL are not cheap. Each virtual machine for a dev is a problem. For a small startup, the cost is the time it takes to try and understand your licencing agreements - it wastes a lot of time...

powertower 15y ago
If it takes a developer so much time to understand the licensing terms, or to activate a Microsoft product, ... that it cuts into their production time, they don't need to be messing with anything other than PHP.
- dextorious 15y ago
  You mean the language that powers the biggest social website of all time, Facebook, plus around 40% of the web? What exactly have you built in .NET that is greater?
  - powertower 15y ago
    That's turned out so well for Facebook that all they kept of PHP was the syntax (too much of it to get rid of it, and esay to find people that know it) and threw away the rest. And the other 40% of the web ... well, it's cheap and has low barriers to entry. That does not mean it's great.
    - dextorious 15y ago
      """That's turned out so well for Facebook that all they kept of PHP was the syntax (too much of it to get rid of it, and esay to find people that know it) and threw away the rest.""" For one, PHP (any language actually) is it's syntax and libs. So, that they "threw away the rest" is not an argument against PHP. People also run Rails on different rubies (JRuby/Rubinious/Ruby EE etc), so what? And they "threw" those for performance reasons, not for some better, purer language. If they had enough problems with PHPs performance to write a C++ compiler for it, you think they would have faired better if they started with something like Rails? Second, yeah, with multi billions revenue and nearly a bln users, yeah, I'd say it turned out pretty well for them. Proves that you can get pro --it doesn't get any more pro than FB in the web business-- without using expensive tools or the language du jour. """And the other 40% of the web ... well, it's cheap and has low barriers to entry. That does not mean it's great.""" There are Drupal/Wordpress sites that are among the best of the world... I don't know what you mean by "cheap" in this context. Is whitehouse.gov cheap?
      - powertower 15y ago
        > with multi billions revenue and nearly a bln users, yeah, I'd say it turned out pretty well for them. If you want to attribute the lions share of success of Facebook to PHP, rather than the social effect and being in the right time in the right place, or other work put into it, that's fine with me. But I'll still disagree. > they "threw away the rest" is not an argument against PHP. If replacing the backend (compiler, libs, etc) because it's so buggy and does not scale at all, is not an argument, than nothing will be ... and I'm going to stop here and let this die.

azakai 15y ago

> The licensing costs for VS.NET, MSQL, and related products are a rounding error compared to the cost of salary paid to a 3-7 man team. Not for a pre-seed startup. In that common situation, software licensing costs can be by far the biggest cost you have. > Using open-source tools to save a few dollars is a sure sign of incompetence, inexperience, and a soon-to-fail project. Saving a few dollars in return for tools that are on average of similar quality - sometimes better, sometimes worse - is in no way like what you just described.

powertower 15y ago
> Not for a pre-seed startup. In that common situation, software licensing costs can be by far the biggest cost you have. In that situation, it's almost free-of-charge from Microsoft with their BizSpark (and similar) programs.
- azakai 15y ago
  And as already mentioned by others, the problem is that the procedure for getting software through that (and other confusing programs) is convoluted. For a startup, messing with that is a distraction when there are equal-quality tools available by simple download.
  - powertower 15y ago
    If you have personal experience with this please share it. The other people in this thread basically said it was great except for one individual who had a problem with a host that would not allow user serials. > when there are equal-quality tools available by simple download I suppose the keyword is when or if. I which case that becomes true.
    - azakai 15y ago
      > If you have personal experience with this please share it. The other people in this thread basically said it was great except for one individual who had a problem with a host that would not allow user serials. Are we reading the same thread? Pretty much everyone agrees that MS licensing is convoluted and bothersome. >> when there are equal-quality tools available by simple download > I suppose the keyword is when or if. I which case that becomes true. Good software can be proprietary or open source. These days, neither is better than the other overall. You need to make a specific choice in each case.

dextorious 15y ago

"""The licensing costs for VS.NET, MSQL, and related products are a rounding error compared to the cost of salary paid to a 3-7 man team.""" 1) You keep using these words: rounding error. I don't think they mean what you think it means. There are startups, and successful ones, that have the tiniest of budgets. People literally survive on ramen and faith. For those kind of companies, the costs are not a rounding error -- and there's often no salary or minimal salary paid to the 3-7 man team initially, while they still have to have some servers and development tools. 2) It's not just the licensing costs. Even for a team with tons of cash that makes them negligible, depending on a stack fully determined by some other company is not a good idea. Startups rewrite stuff all the time, use different technologies when they find out the old doesn't fit nicely enough, etc. You can't be dragged down because you have written all your code in a proprietary stack for each and every component...

powertower 15y ago
> 1) You keep using these words: rounding error. I don't think they mean what you think it means. I've used those words once. > You can't be dragged down because you have written all your code in a proprietary stack for each and every component... No. But you can be dragged down with buggy, poorly engineered, and badly integrated tools.
- azakai 15y ago
  >> You can't be dragged down because you have written all your code in a proprietary stack for each and every component... > No. But you can be dragged down with buggy, poorly engineered, and badly integrated tools. And that has nothing to do with whether they are proprietary or open source.