Apologees for being uninformed
A few days ago Ben Forta posted, on his blog, an article about the costs of ColdFusion. Well, I read it and I commented on it based on a lack of research on the pricing of other technologies specifically .NET and I apologize. A guy named David posted after I did and was talking about the pricing for .NET. After looking around at all the prerequisites needed to run a Windows .NET environment I realized that running a .NET environment is pretty expensive as well.
| Product Offering | U.S. Price* | Description |
|
Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition |
$999 |
Available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Includes 5 CALs (User or Device, chosen after purchase) |
|
Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition |
$1,199 |
Available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Includes 10 CALs (User or Device, chosen after purchase) |
|
Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition |
$3,999 |
Available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Includes 25 CALs (User or Device, chosen after purchase) |
|
Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter Edition |
$2,999 |
Available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. |
|
Windows Server 2003 Web Edition, 32-bit version |
$399 Open NL |
Web Server product, no CALs required. Windows Server 2003 Web Edition, is not available in all channels. Open NL estimated price is $399. Contact your local System Builder, OEM, or reseller for actual prices or for more information on how to purchase. |
| Client Access Licenses (Please refer to the note below for CAL information on Windows Server 2003 R2) | U.S. Price* | Description |
|
Windows Server 2003, Client Access License 5-pack |
$199 |
5 additional Windows Server 2003 CALs (User or Device, chosen at time of purchase) |
|
Windows Server 2003, Client Access License 20-pack |
$799 |
20 additional Windows Server 2003 CALs (User or Device, chosen at time of purchase) |
|
Windows Server 2003, TS Client Access License 5-pack |
$749 |
5 additional Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server (TS) CALs (User or Device, chosen at time of purchase) |
|
Windows Server 2003, TS Client Access License 20-pack |
$2,979 |
20 additional Windows Server 2003 TS CALs (User or Device, chosen at time of purchase) |
| Connectors | U.S. Price* | Description |
|
Windows Server 2003, External Connector License |
$1,999*** |
Optional additional server license for External Users accessing Windows Server 2003 software |
|
Windows Server 2003, Terminal Server External Connector License |
$7,999*** |
Optional additional server license for External Users accessing Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server |
| Product | Buy | Renew |
| Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition with MSDN Premium Subscription | $2,499 | $1,999 |
| Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition with MSDN Professional Subscription | $1,199 | $799 |
Also, now that I think about it, people say that ColdFusion is not learned by new programmers and I think that Adobe should do something about that with the Universities. It’s completely free to learn CF with CFEclipse and the developers version of CF server. The problem is that most students are learning C# and VB in school and when they come out they further saturate the .NET job market. That’s why it’s so hard to find CF developers, because the new brood aren’t picking it up until later in life.
I love ColdFusion, and I have been successful in converting other developers away from .NET in the past. The biggest reason they move to CF is the learning curve and the ease of development. I have met some developers who don’t know some of the tricks in HTML, Javascript, and CSS because VS does a lot of it for them. Anyway, I retract my comment in Ben’s blog…ColdFusion is better priced than .NET, at least according to the pricing above.
You list the price of Windows Server to show how expensive it is to run .Net, but that’s only the starting price if you want to run ColdFusion on Windows. Add $2000-$8000 on to that. Sure you can run Linux for a free OS, but not everyone knows as much about running a Linux environment as they do running a Windows one. If I went down the Linux route it would cost me more because of having to buy in new expertise. As a Microsoft Partner I have the lifeline of calling them up if there’s an emergency in production (at no extra cost) but I’m pretty sure I can’t get that if I download a free distribution of Linux.
Visual Studio 2008 Professional costs $600 from discount retailers if you don’t need the MSDN subscription. If there was something just like that for CF I’d be over the moon.
I am sorry, but I can’t relate to the emergency on a production environment because I haven’t personally lived through a catastrophe in a Windows or Linux environment. I am glad the there is a free tech support hotline for those instances though. I just noticed the pricing for the server and saw the pricing similarities and realized I was wrong on the pricing comment I made. About the Visual Studio comment, I am not sure if you were talking about the price of the non-MSDN offering as great, but there are free CF IDEs out there.
Just a little side note learned the hard way:
The cheap Windows Server Web Edition 2003 is limited to 2GB of RAM. It will ignore anything more than that. It’s a limited version of the server software.