back to article Euro-cloud consortium issues ultimatum to Microsoft: Fix your licensing or else

A group of cloud infrastructure providers in Europe has delivered an ultimatum to Microsoft: End the "unjustified feature and pricing discriminations against fair competition" or face legal action. With 27 member organizations – including 26 headquartered in the region plus US-based AWS – Cloud Infrastructure Providers in …

  1. Peter-Waterman1

    Tip of the ice berg

    Given all of Azure's security and reliability issues, they can't compete on a level playing field and need to bend the rules. Here are a few more items to throw on the fire:

    No passive licencing is allowed on SQL Database as a service platform in the cloud, except Azure.

    You are not allowed to bring Windows Server 2022 licences to the cloud, but you can use your licences to get a discount in Azure

    You are not allowed to use Development licences, aka MSDN in the Cloud, except you can in Azure

    Multi-session VDI (covered in this article)

    Not allowed to use Office on Cloud VDI (until very recently in AWS, but still not in GCP)

    Making rival clouds pay way more for their licences than the normal enterprise licence costs

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Tip of the ice berg

      In addition, MS, as per the US demanding data from an MS Irish data centre, MS said the Irish data centre was a "different company", an arms-length subsidiary, subject to Irish, not US law. Thanks to GDPR, MS divested their EU data centres into a new EU based MS construct to claim they were "safe" under GDPR and not subject to the US Patriot Act. So, logically, this means MS are selling licences to 3rd party cloud providers in the EU but giving preferential rates to only one of those 3rd parties, the one(s) with MS in their name (and probably paying massive royalties for that privilege such they make little no profits in the EU, pay little to no tax in the EU and send all those royalty payments to the MS mother ship.

      These big multi-nationals are have become so tangled in their own tax avoiding webs that they will be hoist by their petard because of the contradictory legal arguments they keep trotting out where one moment they are "Microsoft" for $reasons and the next moment, they "arms length and separate entities" for other legal $reasons.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Tip of the ice berg

      The MSDN one is interesting. I sold MSDN at Microsoft for years. The spiel was always that for most organisations 50%+ of servers were non-prod. If they bought MSDN, then the licensing for these servers became’ in effect, free.

      By extrapolation, this means that if you CAN use MSDN in Azure, but CANNOT use MSDN with other cloud providers, then your cost of server licensing is immediately doubled as you would have to cover all non-prod servers with a prod server license.

      1. Peter-Waterman1

        Re: Tip of the ice berg

        Exactly this. But what’s stupid about their tactics is that it’s driving their own customers to Linux which is rapidly gaining market share.

  2. 43300 Silver badge

    Another relevant point is that the mutl-session VDI restriction doesn't just apply to other cloudy providers - it also applies to on-prem hardware (unless you are using Azure Stack HCI as the on-prem hypervisor).

    Yes, it's still possible to run terminal servers with Server 2022 as the OS but they have a number of compromises compared to AVD.

    I can't see any valid technical reason why it shouldn't be possible to license and use AVD on any on-prem or cloudy hosting infrastructure.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Same ole same ole MICROS~1

    > Redmond hasn't budged on deals that make its wares cheaper on Azure, and regulators are circling

  4. MatthewSt Silver badge

    Peak?

    While they're not wrong, they probably want to use more realistic numbers for their calculations. There are 720 hours in a 30 day month, so to say that you've got 730 peak hours per month seems a little... Enthusiastic.

    1. Stu J

      Re: Peak?

      365 x 24 / 12 =

      Guess what?

      730

      It's called an average.

      1. MatthewSt Silver badge

        Re: Peak?

        I appreciate that, but who declares their "peak" hours to be 24/7/365? That's not what peak means.

        If we assume 40 hour week, 52 weeks per year (divided by 12) then we've got 173 hours per month. That puts you at €271.36 for Microsoft and €1052.28 for "other".

        Still roughly the same ratios, but more believable numbers.

        1. Stu J

          Re: Peak?

          If you're setting something up outside of Azure so that 32 users can log in at any time of any day without significant delays (which is what the equivalent MS offering would permit) you'd need 32 VMs running 24/7/365.

          There is no technical reason for this whatsoever - it's purely Microsoft's discriminatory/predatory/protectionist scumbag licensing terms.

          Of course you can start to do clever automated demand prediction and management to try to scale stuff and work around it on non-Azure deployments, but the fundamental point is that you shouldn't bloody well have to.

          I'm hoping that Microsoft genuinely get taken to the cleaners over this. Their pathetic licensing restrictions stopped us 10+ years ago from offering a highly specialised SaaS VDI hosted on our own tin, because it destroyed any economy of scale across multiple customers.

          Instead we had to deploy Windows PCs everywhere, so MS only got the revenue for those OEM licenses, instead of probably 10x more revenue for ongoing VDI licensed subscriptions.

          The expense that stopped our project from going anywhere perversely wasn't the Microsoft licensing costs, but was the fact that their licenses stipulated that we couldn't share physical servers or SANs across multiple customers. Having to commission new servers and SANs for every single customer, with associated VMware licensing, lead time, and implementation effort destroyed any economic benefit SaaS VDI could have offered.

          Microsoft behaves in a horribly protectionist manner and abuses its position to stifle innovation. They've got everyone by the short-and-curlies, and they don't even have to try to be good any more, as evidenced by the generally terrible quality control of products they release these days.

    2. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

      Re: Peak?

      Are those peak calendar hours or CPU usage hours? Because it's very difficult to find a cloud offering that'll let you limit to a single CPU these days...

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Irrelevant

    If you want to save money just run Linux/Postgres on whatever. If some people want to get gouged that's their problem.

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: Irrelevant

      Even if the gouging is between consenting adults, it needs to be legal gouging.

    2. 43300 Silver badge

      Re: Irrelevant

      Is there ever a thread on here where 'Just use Linux' or similar isn't proposed by somebody as the catch-all solution?

      Sure, in some cases it's a valid option. But in many cases, for a variety of reasons, it simply isn't a realistic proposition. If it was as easy as the Linux fanbois seem to think, Microsoft wouldn't be able to carry on in the way they do as there would be real competition.

      1. Tomato42
        Thumb Down

        Re: Irrelevant

        More often that not, it's "because that's what we already know", and "that's already what users know", those are the reasons why they go for Windows. All while the users end up running just a web browser to access a web application.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Irrelevant

        I would say any new workload as Linux would be fairly easy. But in reality who deploys new workloads on VMs anymore? Most stuff these days is containers or cloud native, which is all Linux under the hood anyway.

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