Hacker News Reader

Comment by bzxcvbn | Hacker News Reader

Seems weird to harp on the cost of a windows license when they're buying Mac OS licenses instead (although hidden in the device's prie).

View on HN

Although not even hinted at in the doc, I personally find the tedium of buying and provisioning and monitoring licenses worse than the cost of it. I suppose you are also inviting risk in the form of an audit.

Most windows laptops today come with a license key baked into the BIOS. So no need to manage licenses here.

I do not believe those are sufficient for enterprise licenses, which must be provided separately.

They are sufficient for pro licenses, though, which are what they mention as the required baseline.

I was looking at a quarter million for a few dozen machines and 2 AD servers and 4 SQL servers. Nearly on par with the cost of the hardware I was buying. Until some bright spark realized it was all testing/dev/qa for those machines, MSDN suddenly was way better cost wise. If all you are doing is testing/dev then MSDN is usually the choice you want (but grab your lawyer to dig into the terms on that one). But in a real env with no dev work, the licenses become a real pain and very costly, and per year recurring many times, and stack because each service type has time, or sometimes they combine. Not dealing with it at all is very tempting.

Also the always-looming threat of Microsoft telemetry and BSA audit. You can do everything right as far as you can tell, abd they can still come in and make your life miserable.

There's no requirement to purchase an enterprise license. Large companies just do that to save money.

Wait, they buy a second license to save money? How does that work and, more importantly, how can I convince lots of folks to buy my product twice to save money?!

you're not really allowed to use those licenses in many contexts. Might be ok for a startup; but at Ubisoft we had to maintain a fleet of KMS infrastructure.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/...

Was your need to maintain KMS actually caused by a Microsoft requirement, or was it rather a cost saving and standarization measure?

It’s one of those “chicken egg” issues, ultimately it’s not enforced until certain scales.

Microsoft does not like >200 machines being activated from 1 IP/Site for example.

But you’ll run into issues running the “pro” version of windows, and you’ll need the enterprise version pretty early.

Computers don’t ship with enterprise, if any do then it’s certainly not all of them.

So you have to license all machines on your network anyway, volume licensing gets cheaper when it’s properly managed.

It’s hard to say there’s a hard limit, because there isn’t really one, but it’s sort of expected.

The more I read of Microsoft licensing, the more it feels like a scam.

I've worked at businesses who employed people full-time to manage Microsoft licensing.

Microsoft licensing goes way beyond Windows - there‘s the whole range of office software (which you can also license on Mac), then all the server software, etc., most of which should does not apply to Gitlab (unless they want to deploy on linux and switch to SQL Server as database, but I doubt that). And then, if you‘re big enough, you can negotiate corporate licensing to save money, which requires license management etc. I doubt any of this applies to Gitlab as they stand.

I had to look again and might have missed it, but I didn’t see where Gitlab expressed concerns about the cost of Windows Professional version. They had concerns with team members sourcing they’re own Windows laptops which would traditionally come with Home Edition and need to be upgraded adding to the IT overhead.

Where were the cost concerns on buying windows licenses?

> macOS is preinstalled on Apple computers and Linux is available free of charge. To approve the use of Windows, GitLab would have to purchase Windows Professional licenses, as Windows Home Edition does not satisfy GitLab's security guidelines.

They are in favour of Linux for it being free, implying that they do not want to pay for Windows.

> To approve the use of Windows, GitLab would have to purchase Windows Professional licenses

I wonder how much that goes back to predatory enforcement where one person using a home/personal license inappropriately could lead to costly audit requests … or the suggestion that if you buy an enterprise license the problem will go away. People have long memories about that kind of thing.

No harping on cost was done. This is a overhead issue, and the same things apply to IBM and Oracle software. Whenever the product needs artificial management to only deal with the specifics of contracts and licences that's just a drain on the business.

While I think not allowing windows is a silly policy, Apple laptops still sell for a serious premium after 3 or 4 years of use. I've worked for companies where this was the sole reason for Mac being the default laptop you got. If you wanted/needed anything else, you had to specifically ask for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com