Most servers around the world run Linux. The same goes for almost all supercomputers. That’s astonishing in a capitalist world where absolutely everything is commodified. Why can’t these big tech companies manage to sell their own software to server operators or supercomputers? Why is an open, free project that is free for users so superior here?
A big piece is licensing. When you’re throwing hundreds or thousands of processor cores into a data center, somewhere a Microsoft VAR is just drooling to sell you datacenter license packs that you’ll need to renew/repurchase for every major OS upgrade. Ah, and you’ll need device/user cals. Oh you want to manage it too? Oof.
As a developer, I actively avoid anything that requires managing licenses. It’s a pain in the ass and if there’s a decent alternative, I’ll take it. It’s also annoying when something needs to be scaled out to handle the load, but I can’t because we don’t have enough licenses. Since I’m not paying for it anyway, it’s not the price I care about, but the software freedom.
Just to really drive this point home, if I go and price out a dell R470 with the default config from dell.ca it’s $9700. If i want a windows server license, that’s another $4700 on top of that.
Why pay 50% more for software that is slower and harder to support? That’s not even thinking about SQL server licensing which is even more expensive.
Almost anyone buying servers already has Microsoft enterprise agreement licenses, which are much cheaper than that retail price.
This is true, but as I recall the minimum users you need to get an enterprise agreement license is ~500 users. So you’re already talking over 6 figures to have the option to buy cheaper server OS licenses.
Maybe I’m misremembering the name, it’s been a while. I remember the minimum volume license purchase was five licenses, but you could buy one Windows server license at whatever price, and four $5 whatever licenses.
I must admit, I’ve been too far removed from the volume licensing to remember how it worked. It was definitely cheaper than retail and I remember 2016 and beyond you paid by 2 physical cores each, at least for datacenter.
All I recall was that they changed the licensing terms twice in ~5 years, and the forced minimum of ~500 users for enterprise put one of my past employers into a bind.
I would not be surprised if they had changed it once or twice since.
They’ve dropped physical cpu licensing model and now you pay per vCPU/thread (unless they’ve changed it again). People would buy a host with 128 cores and use virtualization to cram it into one physical CPU. You’re not wrong that there’s enterprise packages to pay way less, but it’s still a nightmare and if you get audited you’re guaranteed to have to pay up some extra $ since nobody gets it right.
Even the microsoft VARs can’t make sense of it. A previous job (service provider) got audited 2 months after I left and it sounded like a total headache.
That was in 2018 or so, but I’m sure there’s something similar now. If they haven’t forced everyone to subscription licenses, that is.
You’re likely thinking of CALs, and one is required for each person accessing the server. Licensing turns into a nightmare very quickly.
Right. But Linux is… checks notes… free.
Edit: Just because y’all want to pay for support does not make Linux any less free.
most enterprises who need the kind of scale that a Microsoft enterprise agreement even makes sense are paying just as much for Redhat or similar.
“free” is not really a consideration in the selection.
Enterprise Linux however is not. The majority of places won’t buy anything without support. Which is why I sell a lot of Red Hat.
@frongt @Shadow Almost anyone buying servers doesn’t give two hoots about licenses, just freely load them up with a copy of whatever Linux distribution they’ve got.
I worked for a mid size distribution center and just the licensing fees for all types of software for about 500 workers was $100k a month. Just basic warehouse management, erp, Microsoft, etc. Let alone data center licensing.