₦airaland Forum

Kobojunkie:
99.9% of software development companies do it, not just the MS's and the Oracles. Even Sun do it. Licensing is never even cheap for mid size companies. Small companies get grants to help them and these grants go a long way here.

But the licensing model used varies a lot amongst software companies. The question is how flexible is the licensing model

Ghenghis:
The truth is licensing is never cheap for large enterprises be it Linux, windows, .NET or java.
licensing matters a lot, it can also make the difference when approval is to be given to develop a product.
licensing is definitely politicized or economized (for lack of a better word ) I see it all the time with oracle, and MS also gives free licenses when it suits them. Get the customer hooked first

correct that is why large companies especially in these downturn are looking to drastically reduce there licensing overhead.

I have seen some major companies build there own version of linux from source code which is used and maintained in-house. license cost in this case is zero

Linux rules in the server domain and it is gradually gaining ground in the desktop with ubuntu although this still has a long way to go.

Ghenghis:
licensing matters a lot, it can also make the difference when approval is to be given to develop a product.
licensing is definitely politicized or economized (for lack of a better word ) I see it all the time with oracle, and MS also gives free licenses when it suits them. Get the customer hooked first

I have ran into a licensing bottleneck in my company for a couple months ago regarding obtaining additional developer licenses for InteliJ IDEA. Do you know that up till today it has not been approved.

Obviously these developers have had to resort to using eclipse for now while this is getting approved.

The thing is IT budgets are getting killed in this recession and when you come up and say you need license . . management will just look at you with one kin bad eye and tell u to go and manage what u have.

Kobojunkie:
I have worked in large organizations and obtaining licenses has NEVER really been an issue, politics or none. Even with small companies, the understanding is when you go with new technology; you need to think of licensing as well ( it is not one or the other). They go hand in hand.  Just to drop this in, you do know that companies that have to work with even LINUX have to get licenses to run those machines? I am not sure if you know that considering about 2 years ago Sun( or was it novell) sued Walmart for that( I can't quite remember the details but Walmart was accused of using the software without required license).

I am very familiar with many LINUX distros and i can confirm that the community versions of most of these OS are on either GPL or LPGL license which is adequate for most uses. Maybe in the case you cited they were using a pre- packaged version which might have been on a different license.

Kobojunkie:
Many companies such as sun, oracle, Microsoft etc offer volume licensing to allow their customers the flexibility of purchasing additional licenses without having to pay more.

Sorry i wasn't talking about volume licensing . What i was trying to say was that you might have a Company wide license for some feature and in other to use another feature (probably more advance) you might require an additional license.

Kobojunkie:
You CANNOT be free from any form of LICENSING unless you are developing your own OS, your own application in house. I hate to break it to you but any software you have used without considering licensing is probably software you are pirating.!

Even Open Source ware requires you get a license of some sort if you intend to use it for any commercially viable venture. Look it up!

No . . the only restriction on an OSS with a GPL license is that any work based on it most be on GPL too. However LGPL license does not have this restriction

On our Red Hat Linux (GPL license) servers pre-installed with Apache Web server (Apache license) for example running JDK 1.6 (GPL ) i don't care about license.

I can even virtualize this server if i want(this is getting increasingly common this days) without worrying if i am breaking my license agreement.

Kobojunkie:
And you somehow believe .NET workers WORRY much about licensing issues? COME ON!!!! I can assure you that it is not top on our minds cause at the point most companies make the decision to choose the technology, they already factor that as part and move on to better things.

What if you want to try out other technologies in the .NET stack not covered by your existing license. The key here is flexibility because you might have made a decision that you do not require a specific tech and 2 yrs down the line it becomes business critical.

The problem with this approach in Large companies where there is a lot of bureaucracy is that obtaining approval for acquiring additional licenses is not very straight forward.

Personally i normally prefer to be free from any sort of license headache, i want to have the freedom to be able to let my team try out bleeding edge technologies and incorporate into existing or future apps so as to give our business an edge against the competition.

And just to add for people who think the Java language construct is old and too verbose

Well the JVM now supports a multitude of programming languages. You can now develop Scala (which i think is even better than C sharp), Ruby , Phyton etc on the JVM.