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Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

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Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#91

Post by pit »

PallarelCoedr wrote: post #39
pit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, Nancy is a lot of fun to use with Mono. However, I've been stuck trying to get a WCF (older ASP.NET) application running on Mono for a while now, and it's been a huge pain.

Forget about older ASP.NET and WCF on mono. The core of ASP.NET (System.Web assembly) doesn't feature in next version of ASP.NET. WCF hasn't seen any effective development in years. The new stuff (ASP.NET vnext) will be highly mono compatible and like the current OWIN stuff, entirely decoupled from IIS.

Thank you, that's extremely encouraging. I think we can effectively migrate the web service to Nancy while keeping our C# business logic as is.

Should be a fun week!

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#92

Post by germano »

frostmatthew wrote: post #45
joshuaellinger wrote: post #42

Don't worry about suitors - worry about hiring people. Team matters much more than Tech. But, as perspective, MS Dev tools cost about $10K per dev + $3K per year per dev after the first. Engineers costs $100K+ per year. +10% productivity covers the tools. If it costs you a month to retool or saves you a little on salary or lets you hire a little easier, you have paid for the tools. So what matters are things where yo…

> +10% productivity covers the tools That's a bold claim to say using MS Dev tools are sure to increase productivity by 10%. Have anything to back that up? [e.g. studies, not your opinion or anecdotes]. And +10% productivity compared to what? Using C#/.Net without MS tools? Or compared to using a different stack (which seemed to be the OP's question)?

I'd say the assertion was under the assumption that the devs in question know the .Net stack well enough to gain at least a 10% productivity gain over using a stack they are less familiar with.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#93

Post by plorkyeran »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #51
joshuaellinger wrote: post #42

Don't worry about suitors - worry about hiring people. Team matters much more than Tech. But, as perspective, MS Dev tools cost about $10K per dev + $3K per year per dev after the first. Engineers costs $100K+ per year. +10% productivity covers the tools. If it costs you a month to retool or saves you a little on salary or lets you hire a little easier, you have paid for the tools. So what matters are things where yo…

Still salary is paid out over time. Tools cost up-front. In a lean startup that could sink you?

The tools are free for a few years via BizSpark. A lot of companies find the bill at the end of the BizSpark period pretty painful, but you should usually at least be out of lean startup mode by then.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#94

Post by hvidgaard »

allegory wrote: post #43
hvidgaard wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you cannot use the software from a partner program externally. It was only concerning development licensing.

We were informed ambiguously that some development is production. At that point we stopped playing word games and threw our devops infrastructure on Linux.

I do not know who told you that, but MS are pretty clear on what you can and cannot:

  Internal use licenses are for use in a production environment for general internal
  business purposes and not for any type of commercial purpose. For example, installing
  the Windows Server operating system and Microsoft Exchange Server to set up an email
  system that you can use to send business-related email is acceptable. However,
  production use for external commercial purposes, such as hosting a commercial website,
  is outside the scope of these rights. 

  Customer demonstration licenses can be used for demonstration purposes only by partners.
  Sales and marketing employees of the organization can use this software to showcase
  products to your customers, but demonstration products cannot be installed on customer
  hardware or infrastructure and must be used with partner supervision.

  Internal-training licenses can be used for training internal employees only. These
  licenses cannot be used for customer training or for any commercial purpose.

  MSDN subscriptions allow designated employees of your organization to use the available
  software for the design, development, testing, and demonstration phases of application
  development.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#95

Post by phaus »

allegory wrote: post #18

I've been in this situation a couple of times before. It won't make a blind bit of difference initially but if you expand, so will tooling and deployment costs and investors don't like that. Anything that takes off the bottom line is a problem. Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else. We'r…

>Then after a couple of yeara you get a call from the sales guys at MS who want to do a 'soft audit' (which it says they can so in the VL agreement). Then battle commences between MS, yourselves and the disty who handles your VL over how much you owe. This usually starts at £150k-ish for an SME and your ops team will be down for days whilst they work that down.

How can this happen if you already have the software licensed? Shouldn't the result be that you owe them $0?

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#96

Post by yulaow »

phaus wrote: post #95
allegory wrote: post #18

I've been in this situation a couple of times before. It won't make a blind bit of difference initially but if you expand, so will tooling and deployment costs and investors don't like that. Anything that takes off the bottom line is a problem. Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else. We'r…

>Then after a couple of yeara you get a call from the sales guys at MS who want to do a 'soft audit' (which it says they can so in the VL agreement). Then battle commences between MS, yourselves and the disty who handles your VL over how much you owe. This usually starts at £150k-ish for an SME and your ops team will be down for days whilst they work that down. How can this happen if you already have the software lic…

I think he means that the licensing of MS is so much fucked up and confusionary ( It is basically the only thing I really hate of MS) that in the end even trying to do your best to have a perfect coverage, you end up with something wrong.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#97

Post by allegory »

phaus wrote: post #95
allegory wrote: post #18

I've been in this situation a couple of times before. It won't make a blind bit of difference initially but if you expand, so will tooling and deployment costs and investors don't like that. Anything that takes off the bottom line is a problem. Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else. We'r…

>Then after a couple of yeara you get a call from the sales guys at MS who want to do a 'soft audit' (which it says they can so in the VL agreement). Then battle commences between MS, yourselves and the disty who handles your VL over how much you owe. This usually starts at £150k-ish for an SME and your ops team will be down for days whilst they work that down. How can this happen if you already have the software lic…

The terms are conflicting across the board so they get to choose the interpretation that suits them best.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#98

Post by allegory »

hvidgaard wrote: post #94
allegory wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were informed ambiguously that some development is production. At that point we stopped playing word games and threw our devops infrastructure on Linux.

I do not know who told you that, but MS are pretty clear on what you can and cannot: Internal use licenses are for use in a production environment for general internal business purposes and not for any type of commercial purpose. For example, installing the Windows Server operating system and Microsoft Exchange Server to set up an email system that you can use to send business-related email is acceptable. However, pr…

Can you install JIRA on that copy of windows 2008 server R2 and access it via VPN?

Straight away we have ambiguity.

Can you run your staging site on it for demonstration purposes?

More ambiguity.

All it takes is a small mis-step.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#99

Post by silverbax88 »

tlogan wrote: post #24
silverbax88 wrote: post #22

It doesn't matter at all. In general investors have no clue about coding.

They do hire "deal breakers" (experienced programmers which work in a basement of a VC firm whose only job to convince VC not to invest :-)). At least they had them in early 2000s. Not sure if that is case now.

I've been one of those guys on contract, but only for really big deals, not really the ones I've seen on HN. The last one I worked on was a deal which was funded by Morgan Stanley and a few others - they put in about $800 million, I believe.

They bought the platform (mostly written in Oracle) and we recommended they re-write their external APIs (which were written in Java). They did both, re-wrote the APIs in .NET, which is what we recommended (because they had no Java programmers but they had 6 really solid .NET guys already on staff...honestly, companies have no idea of what assets they have in house). Company went public last year. Just hit $1B in revenue just before going public.

If we had walked in and seen a bunch of No SQL or some fad junk, we would have told them to bail. You can't play around when you are playing with these level of businesses.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#100

Post by hvidgaard »

allegory wrote: post #98
hvidgaard wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know who told you that, but MS are pretty clear on what you can and cannot: Internal use licenses are for use in a production environment for general internal business purposes and not for any type of commercial purpose. For example, installing the Windows Server operating system and Microsoft Exchange Server to set up an email system that you can use to send business-related email is acceptable. However, pr…

Can you install JIRA on that copy of windows 2008 server R2 and access it via VPN? Straight away we have ambiguity. Can you run your staging site on it for demonstration purposes? More ambiguity. All it takes is a small mis-step.

    Can you install JIRA on that copy of windows 2008 server R2 and access it via VPN?
Depends on what version of JIRA you're talking about. As long as it's supporting your product, be it purely internal (project management) or customer related (issue tracking and CRM) I'm pretty sure it falls under the first paragraph. Note that it states internal business purposes, not on site use only. CRM is not "commercial purposes" in it self, and resembles email example.

    Can you run your staging site on it for demonstration purposes?
It clearly falls under the second paragraph.
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