Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yikes. Why would you pay retail for that stuff? Small Business Server gives you all the backend stuff for more like $1000 per server. BizSpark/EmpowerISV/WhateverTheyCallItNextYear gives you all the dev tools and OS stuff essentially for free. I can't imagine that anybody has EVER actually paid $7k per processor for a SQL Server license. We've been running it on our servers for years, properly licensed, and never eve…
BizSpark has an expiration date, as covered by a comment on Rob's blog: http://blog.wekeroad.com/2010/05/19/no-sql-in-the-wild#comme...
Microsoft comes out with new ISV programs about as often as new versions of Visual Studio. As long as you join the latest one every few years, you'll always have an up-to-date set of developer tools.
So all that's left is server costs, which as I mentioned above come to a little over $1k/box.