Obligatory rant about M$$ licen$ing

RussS

Sheesh, I am about ready to tell my clients to use open office

Have a client that is working quite nicely with Office '97 and I talked them into upgrading to Office 2007 (yup, I a silly beggar I know). Actually the plan was to buy Office '97 and back port to Office 2003 to keep continuity with their contractors who mostly all use 2003 now, but unfortunately you can only back port if you have Volume Licen$ing which is about double the price of boxed software. Anyways, installed on all of their workstations yesterday and then went to install it on their Terminal server (5 users with each user also having a local copy).
Guess what - Office 2007 does not install on TS. You HAVE to install the Volume Licen$ed product
NOWHERE on the box does it say that you can not install it on a terminal Server. To say that I am upset is like sating WWII was a local skirmish I wonder how M$ will react after I call them on Monday because the product manager is going to get one heck of an earful. My client is so ticked off they are considering going back to their old server OS (Red Hat) and looking at *nix for the desktops with maybe some Macs for their design department.

sprkymrk

Wow, you're right. Check this out - even KNOWING the keywords to search for (after reading your post) this is all I found on MS after 30 minutes of searching:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311241

Note In addition to the requirements that are listed in the Summary section, 2007 Office suites also require an Enterprise Product Key to be used when you install the product. If a Retail Product Key has been used, an alert that is similar to the one listed below will be displayed.
This copy of Microsoft Office Excel cannot be used on Terminal Server. Please contact your local authorized Microsoft retailer for more information

That wasn't even the subject or topic of the link either, but it was just a little "oh, by the way..."

Plantwiz

Well, after selling a bit of OpenBusiness licensing, MS is really making the push for Open_Value which is only available with SA.

Heck, I'm almost convinced SA is the way to go, the downside is that MS seems to be successfully making it undesireable to stay with older versions by making the newest versions way overpriced and no support on old versions by heavily marketing the 'value' of paying for licesing 3 years with a value noticed (appreciated) for those who stick with OpenValue for 6 years (2 terms) and do plan for upgrading.

So, they've finally maybe agreed that the 2 year SA is a bad investment, but they are sort-of saying that we know 3years is too soon for us release a new product....so stay with it and we'll catch you around year 5.

***

Yeah, the only way to fight it is to stop using it. Pretty challenging when almost every box sold comes with it installed. Good for you if you can convince your clients to use OpenOffice or one of the other open source products....I like them, but just don't see a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon unless they are techs.

blargoe

Wow... I don't know what to say. Good grief.

JDMurray

RussS wrote:

My client is so ticked off they are considering going back to their old server OS (Red Hat) and looking at *nix for the desktops with maybe some Macs for their design department.

Hey, what a coincidence, Ubuntu Linux 7.04 was just release this week! I'm using Ubuntu 7 to clobber the Windows XP installed on my Dell laptop right now.

sprkymrk wrote:

That wasn't even the subject or topic of the link either, but it was just a little "oh, by the way..."

The M$ content control trolls must've missed it. Report it to them as "bad content" and they might give a free VLK.

Plantwiz

JDMurray wrote:

RussS wrote:

My client is so ticked off they are considering going back to their old server OS (Red Hat) and looking at *nix for the desktops with maybe some Macs for their design department.

Hey, what a coincidence, Ubuntu Linux 7.04 was just release this week! I'm using Ubuntu 7 to clobber the Windows XP installed on my Dell laptop right now.

What sort of applications do you run with Ubuntu? Just Word Processor/Spreadsheet/Adobe-like things? What happens if you need to run QB or some other app that needs Windows? Are you left with running VMWare and still running Windows?

royal

I used to use Linux for a few months and when I needed to use a Windows application, I would run it under a Windows emulated environment called Wine. I've heard there is a newer better Windows emulated environment, but I forgot its name.

Also, I agree that Microsoft licensing can get very complex, tedious, and overall very annoying.

JDMurray

Plantwiz wrote:

What sort of applications do you run with Ubuntu? Just Word Processor/Spreadsheet/Adobe-like things? What happens if you need to run QB or some other app that needs Windows? Are you left with running VMWare and still running Windows?

Ah, these are the primary questions people must consider when switching from one OS to another, and especially when going from Windows to Mac or Linux.

When I decided to replace WinXP with Ubuntu on my laptop, I had to first examine what I really use my laptop for and is there be anything I do now that I won't be able to do with Ubuntu. As you point out, there is a lot of Windows-only software out there. Some has Linux equivalents, but most do not. So just what will I loose?

In my case, I use my laptop for writing, Web access, running older PC games, some Web design work, running IT cert training programs, running network and wireless "hacking" programs, and a little Visual Basic programming. Well, all of the Windows games, tools, and training programs can't be directly installed. I will be experimenting with programs that allow running Windows under Linux, but my P3-500 laptop with 512MB RAM may not be the best machine to use for Windows emulation. I'll certainly find out.

For this experiment, I'm really looking at what I will gain by being able to tote around a Linux machine.