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this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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Linux
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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.
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.
Right. But Linux is.... checks notes... free.
Edit: Just because y'all want to pay for support does not make Linux any less free.
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.
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.