Hi there Tek Syndicate. I just finished watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QDe-HTZtMY and It explained a great deal on server licensing. I want to know if this video is accurate about the expenses because it explained I needed to have a commercial license for every core of my cpu, and I find that a little insane... I would also like to know who enforces hardware licenses like that.
Licensing is crazy complicated. You can usually call the software vendor if you don't know and work out with them what you need to buy. In Microsoft land there are usually limits and general weirdness.. e.g. small business server client access licenses can be different from regular server licenses, and you need an OS license but sometimes the OS license comes with an extra license to run a copy or two virtually (but not on real hardware) and goofy arbitrary things like that. Lower versions of windows server limit the supported hardware or number of cores though microsoft generally licenses by cpu socket (1-2 cpu sockets vs 1-4 or 1-8 cpu sockets) with as many cores as you could cram in. so. e.g. 4 4 core CPUs generally is way more licensing cost than 2 8 core CPUs which i s weird.
Fortunately it's to the point that for small businesses, open source can do almost everything anyone needs. no per user or per-server licensing costs there unless you elect to go with one of the commercial open source projects.. but there what you're really paying for is support and possibly and update service.
so yeah, licensing can be crazy complicated because $$$$$