[shingen]

I don't see what's "rich" about that at all.

The Win stack is a trivial cost in their business compared to the revenue potential of StackExchange.

The biggest cost in their business is labor, not licenses. That will always be the case. License costs will continue to shrink toward irrelevant as a percentage of their sales over time.

Given their wild success, there's no great argument to be made against what they've done: quite simply, it has worked, and worked very well. That is all that will ever matter, regardless of what argument is thrown around.

[reuser]

If license costs are so big that they become this important a factor in deciding how you will scale, they have become an operational problem of some size. Probably not a size which is imminently threatening to Stack Exchange. But it is not nothing, or it would not figure so prominently in this shop talk about how to upgrade.

It's certainly a factor worth weighing when you consider what technology you'll build on top of.

In no place have I "argued against what they've done" or implied that the company is a failure. Yet money IS a part of scaling, and managing expenses IS a part of business. I'm happy to take your word that Stack Exchange makes so much money that it cannot ever matter how much their licenses cost. But in the context of evangelism for others to make the same decision, I have to observe that the kind of reasoning casually mentioned in the article implies something that would be negative for many other businesses.

If you are offended by that sort of discussion of reality then you have too thin a skin (or a conflict of interests)