6 ms·

I've been in this situation a couple of times before. It won't make a blind bit of difference initially but if you expand, so will tooling and deployment costs

I've been in this situation a couple of times before. It won't make a blind bit of difference initially but if you expand, so will tooling and deployment costs and investors don't like that. Anything that takes off the bottom line is a problem. Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else. We're like that now. Our SQL licensing is shaping our architecture not on technical merit but avoiding core license costs. That is beyond bad but we can't justify a £200k spend on licenses and kit to get rid of 2008R2. Inevitably bits of Python are now appearing around the edges of the product and trying to stab the core. There are a couple of postgresql machines doing ancillary work. All the staff are slowly moving their operational task over because there isn't a purchase process. This is the price of success though :) Edit: just to add that the last two companies I worked for are Python/java/postgres houses now after being end to end MS outfits. The staff change over the lifecycle of a product. You can afford better people after time and better people seem to prefer to use other platforms even if they market themselves as .Net people. Edit 2: also once you're locked in, volume licensing looks cost efficient. Then after a couple of yeara you get a call from the sales guys at MS who want to do a 'soft audit' (which it says they can so in the VL agreement). Then battle commences between MS, yourselves and the disty who handles your VL over how much you owe. This usually starts at £150k-ish for an SME and your ops team will be down for days whilst they work that down. Our liability was less than £10k which is within the VL safe zone but other companies are less lucky. Also the VL settlement says you can't discuss it but fuck them - the company this was against is dissolved. Actually I look at my post and I couldn't possibly recommend it. If we'd started differently we could afford to be employ and sponsor postgres core team staff for example and gave second to none support and a positive impact on the community. Instead, pockets are lined elsewhere.

justin66 12y ago
> Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else. Oracle? SAP?
- allegory 12y ago
  It works out about the same as Oracle now from SQL 2012. Azure is the only way to cut costs but the managed SQL services are awful. Both are equally hassle-some. SAP is different - you're not paying for a product, you're paying for consultants on subscription and a product... Oracle tooling I.e. JDK, Netbeans, Oracle Linux (repackaged RHEL) etc is 100% free. VS isn't.
hvidgaard 12y ago
Most dev licensing are covered with an Action Pack for less than 500$, and once you gain some traction as a Silver Partner. SQL Server, while expensive, isn't that bad compared to similar supported RDMS, and in any case, nothing prevents you from using a free RDMS in place.
- allegory 12y ago
  We were a gold partner. There are no reasonable discounts over what you pay. Add to that the support isn't any better than the pay per incident support. Action pack is reasonable value but you can't use it to deploy production kit on. Not only that the definition of internal use is so vague it's a risk. We got an audit. It wasn't cheap to sort out what we thought was in compliance.
  - hvidgaard 12y ago
    Of course you cannot use the software from a partner program externally. It was only concerning development licensing.
    - allegory 12y ago
      We were informed ambiguously that some development is production. At that point we stopped playing word games and threw our devops infrastructure on Linux.
      - hvidgaard 12y ago
        I do not know who told you that, but MS are pretty clear on what you can and cannot: Internal use licenses are for use in a production environment for general internal business purposes and not for any type of commercial purpose. For example, installing the Windows Server operating system and Microsoft Exchange Server to set up an email system that you can use to send business-related email is acceptable. However, production use for external commercial purposes, such as hosting a commercial website, is outside the scope of these rights. Customer demonstration licenses can be used for demonstration purposes only by partners. Sales and marketing employees of the organization can use this software to showcase products to your customers, but demonstration products cannot be installed on customer hardware or infrastructure and must be used with partner supervision. Internal-training licenses can be used for training internal employees only. These licenses cannot be used for customer training or for any commercial purpose. MSDN subscriptions allow designated employees of your organization to use the available software for the design, development, testing, and demonstration phases of application development.
stirno 12y ago
I think you've tied your entire response to SQL Server rather than the .NET stack so I'll do the same from an ASP.NET aspect.. ASP.NET is moving at an incredible pace, the new vNext bits are planned to be officially cross-platform and you can support any number of database backends from a .NET codebase. I also challenge your assertion that better people seem to use other platforms. You can find people marketing themselves as one thing but preferring another in any stack. This is not indicative of anything more than someone needing a job and meeting the requirements of a posting. Licensing costs can vary. Between BizSpark, DreamSpark and other programs you can get dev tools out of the way quickly. They also provide Windows licensing for the period you're in the program. The areas where you can get in real trouble as a startup with Microsoft are the add-on product stacks like SQL Server and BizTalk (shudder). I would avoid these in a new product but do not fear building with the .NET platform.
- allegory 12y ago
  SQL server is pretty much inevitable otherwise you have to deploy on Linux (don't get me started on pgsql/mysql on windows). Then you have two disparate skill sets to maintain at great cost. Startups need to stick to heterogeneous platforms to keep costs low. Asp.net v.next is currently a bag of promises. I wouldn't put a product near it for a long time. I back this assertion up with the promises of Velocity, EF4, SilverLight and WF4, all of which were disasterous piles of immature crud that disappeared after a bit leading to massive rewrites. Even MVC has a patchy history and numerous problems in it now (crazy API churn, attribute lifecycle/scope, memory ceiling, routing performance etc are all ones that I've spent days on...). Generally the entire web and enterprise teams have knocked out low quality rubbish for years. People who advertise themselves as .net developers (as I do) know how to get paid a lot, not necessarily deliver the best solution for the money. There are those of us however who have fingers in many pots who know how greener the grass is and how organisations would benefit from a change and are taken on to fix the tech stack. Agree with your assertion about BizTalk but mno further.
  - locusm 12y ago
    Care to comment on your .Net/pgsql experience?
skrebbel 12y ago
This entire argument breaks down if you go for e.g. Postgres and Mono/Linux. We do exactly this and it works great. The parts where .NET really shines are all open source (or have a good OS implementation, such as Mono).
- allegory 12y ago
  Yes I agree there entirely. But you might as well use java and get the better tooling and staff availability then...
  - jagawhowho 12y ago
    You can use emacs + ommisharp. Tooling is surprisingly awesome.
    - allegory 12y ago
      Thanks - will look at that!
zaphar 12y ago
I work on a .Net stack now and we are slowly moving over to Mono with Open Source alternatives to the MS specific stuff. Not because of investment fear but because the MS stack is both expensive and sub par. Most of the world has moved past them and there are much better options out there. C# is a wonderful language but the MS tooling needs a lot more work to get on par with what else is available. Especially the build tooling.
- walljm 12y ago
  In our specific case, thought the expense is nice, it doesn't really matter. Security, on the other hand, is the driving reason we're migrating away from Windows.
phaus 12y ago
>Then after a couple of yeara you get a call from the sales guys at MS who want to do a 'soft audit' (which it says they can so in the VL agreement). Then battle commences between MS, yourselves and the disty who handles your VL over how much you owe. This usually starts at £150k-ish for an SME and your ops team will be down for days whilst they work that down. How can this happen if you already have the software licensed? Shouldn't the result be that you owe them $0?
- yulaow 12y ago
  I think he means that the licensing of MS is so much fucked up and confusionary ( It is basically the only thing I really hate of MS) that in the end even trying to do your best to have a perfect coverage, you end up with something wrong.
- allegory 12y ago
  The terms are conflicting across the board so they get to choose the interpretation that suits them best.

justin66 12y ago

> Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else. Oracle? SAP?

allegory 12y ago
It works out about the same as Oracle now from SQL 2012. Azure is the only way to cut costs but the managed SQL services are awful. Both are equally hassle-some. SAP is different - you're not paying for a product, you're paying for consultants on subscription and a product... Oracle tooling I.e. JDK, Netbeans, Oracle Linux (repackaged RHEL) etc is 100% free. VS isn't.

hvidgaard 12y ago

Most dev licensing are covered with an Action Pack for less than 500$, and once you gain some traction as a Silver Partner. SQL Server, while expensive, isn't that bad compared to similar supported RDMS, and in any case, nothing prevents you from using a free RDMS in place.

allegory 12y ago
We were a gold partner. There are no reasonable discounts over what you pay. Add to that the support isn't any better than the pay per incident support. Action pack is reasonable value but you can't use it to deploy production kit on. Not only that the definition of internal use is so vague it's a risk. We got an audit. It wasn't cheap to sort out what we thought was in compliance.
- hvidgaard 12y ago
  Of course you cannot use the software from a partner program externally. It was only concerning development licensing.
  - allegory 12y ago
    We were informed ambiguously that some development is production. At that point we stopped playing word games and threw our devops infrastructure on Linux.
    - hvidgaard 12y ago
      I do not know who told you that, but MS are pretty clear on what you can and cannot: Internal use licenses are for use in a production environment for general internal business purposes and not for any type of commercial purpose. For example, installing the Windows Server operating system and Microsoft Exchange Server to set up an email system that you can use to send business-related email is acceptable. However, production use for external commercial purposes, such as hosting a commercial website, is outside the scope of these rights. Customer demonstration licenses can be used for demonstration purposes only by partners. Sales and marketing employees of the organization can use this software to showcase products to your customers, but demonstration products cannot be installed on customer hardware or infrastructure and must be used with partner supervision. Internal-training licenses can be used for training internal employees only. These licenses cannot be used for customer training or for any commercial purpose. MSDN subscriptions allow designated employees of your organization to use the available software for the design, development, testing, and demonstration phases of application development.

stirno 12y ago

I think you've tied your entire response to SQL Server rather than the .NET stack so I'll do the same from an ASP.NET aspect.. ASP.NET is moving at an incredible pace, the new vNext bits are planned to be officially cross-platform and you can support any number of database backends from a .NET codebase. I also challenge your assertion that better people seem to use other platforms. You can find people marketing themselves as one thing but preferring another in any stack. This is not indicative of anything more than someone needing a job and meeting the requirements of a posting. Licensing costs can vary. Between BizSpark, DreamSpark and other programs you can get dev tools out of the way quickly. They also provide Windows licensing for the period you're in the program. The areas where you can get in real trouble as a startup with Microsoft are the add-on product stacks like SQL Server and BizTalk (shudder). I would avoid these in a new product but do not fear building with the .NET platform.

allegory 12y ago
SQL server is pretty much inevitable otherwise you have to deploy on Linux (don't get me started on pgsql/mysql on windows). Then you have two disparate skill sets to maintain at great cost. Startups need to stick to heterogeneous platforms to keep costs low. Asp.net v.next is currently a bag of promises. I wouldn't put a product near it for a long time. I back this assertion up with the promises of Velocity, EF4, SilverLight and WF4, all of which were disasterous piles of immature crud that disappeared after a bit leading to massive rewrites. Even MVC has a patchy history and numerous problems in it now (crazy API churn, attribute lifecycle/scope, memory ceiling, routing performance etc are all ones that I've spent days on...). Generally the entire web and enterprise teams have knocked out low quality rubbish for years. People who advertise themselves as .net developers (as I do) know how to get paid a lot, not necessarily deliver the best solution for the money. There are those of us however who have fingers in many pots who know how greener the grass is and how organisations would benefit from a change and are taken on to fix the tech stack. Agree with your assertion about BizTalk but mno further.
- locusm 12y ago
  Care to comment on your .Net/pgsql experience?

skrebbel 12y ago

This entire argument breaks down if you go for e.g. Postgres and Mono/Linux. We do exactly this and it works great. The parts where .NET really shines are all open source (or have a good OS implementation, such as Mono).

allegory 12y ago
Yes I agree there entirely. But you might as well use java and get the better tooling and staff availability then...
- jagawhowho 12y ago
  You can use emacs + ommisharp. Tooling is surprisingly awesome.
  - allegory 12y ago
    Thanks - will look at that!

zaphar 12y ago

I work on a .Net stack now and we are slowly moving over to Mono with Open Source alternatives to the MS specific stuff. Not because of investment fear but because the MS stack is both expensive and sub par. Most of the world has moved past them and there are much better options out there. C# is a wonderful language but the MS tooling needs a lot more work to get on par with what else is available. Especially the build tooling.

walljm 12y ago
In our specific case, thought the expense is nice, it doesn't really matter. Security, on the other hand, is the driving reason we're migrating away from Windows.

phaus 12y ago

>Then after a couple of yeara you get a call from the sales guys at MS who want to do a 'soft audit' (which it says they can so in the VL agreement). Then battle commences between MS, yourselves and the disty who handles your VL over how much you owe. This usually starts at £150k-ish for an SME and your ops team will be down for days whilst they work that down. How can this happen if you already have the software licensed? Shouldn't the result be that you owe them $0?

yulaow 12y ago
I think he means that the licensing of MS is so much fucked up and confusionary ( It is basically the only thing I really hate of MS) that in the end even trying to do your best to have a perfect coverage, you end up with something wrong.
allegory 12y ago
The terms are conflicting across the board so they get to choose the interpretation that suits them best.