| This really makes no sense. Pointing to someone who is 5 years into learning the Microsoft ecosystem and who got their last software update two years ago is the worst possible way to prove you don't get "hammered" when you leave Bizspark. Are we really going to pretend that never upgrading their software is an option? For the sake of technical correctness, I'll agree with you, yes its true that you don't get "hammered" when you leave Bizspark. You get "hammered" when you get 5-7 years into the Microsoft ecosystem and realize that you can no longer put off the software upgrades. At that point you have to do the math and figure out which is cheaper: throwing away most of what you have learned and rewriting your software using completely different language and ecosystem OR Dropping "5 figures" on software licenses. Where does the "5 figures" figure come from? An InfoQ interview with the guys behind Tekpub who dropped MS for Rails after being in Bizspark: "RB: If the platform was holding up fine, what prompted the change of architecture? RC: Money. We were enrolled in Microsoft BizSpark Program and it was great for getting off the ground, but projecting into the future we realized that everything - from our database down to our development environment would have to be paid for after 3 years. We also figured that we'd probably need a separate server to run videos properly (for streaming) to Silverlight (using Streaming Media) which would be another license cost - and, in addition, we'd need to buy Media Encoder in order to encode the video for Smooth Streaming. This might not be an issue for a large company, but when we sat down to assess what the bills would be - well let's just say that it was about 5 figures. We put our business hats on and tried to justify that cost - and we couldn't. Not only that, James and I both knew Rails pretty well. We realized we could push everything into the cloud with better streaming and throughput for a microscopic fraction of the price - so that's what we did. JA: As Rob mentioned cost was one of the factors, BizSpark is great but it is basically a ticking time bomb. I think more than cost though the motivating factor was around what we both wanted to be using day to day. ASP.NET MVC and .NET are very lacking in some areas that are very important to us. The testing story on .NET is not the best, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to design your application in the right way to handle testing and then writing the tests themselves is not as clean or usable as some other languages. One of the other areas of high friction was deployment, there are ways to handle it in .NET but nothing as nice or clean as Capistrano. RB: So what does the TekPub platform look like today? RC: We moved to Rails 2.3.5 using MongoMapper against MongoDB. We have a reporting setup that uses MySQL to track stuff we need to report on which uses DataMapper. We also plugged in New Relic RPM to keep track of our site and it's health - all of this is less than 1% of what it would have cost us, on average, with BizSpark. " http://www.infoq.com/articles/architecting-tekpub |