I wanted to make the following public to our customers.  I am doing so because I wish to be transparent and forth-coming with our customers and because I very much disagree with Microsoft's tactics here and very much regret ever attempting to do any business with them.  I understand that we might be an enigma, not pirating any software, but we are strictly in compliance with our licensing.  Free software has made that very exceptionally easy, since the very limited number of commercially licensed applications present on our site has made those applications very easy to keep track of.   I intend to scan and include the original letters from Microsoft shortly.  Luckily, if it does come down to an audit, we'll be very much protected by the fact that -- we're right.

We have just received a letter, with a subject "RE: Review of reporting obligation fulfillment under your Microsoft Service Provider License Agreements(s) ("SPLA"), Master Agreement XXXXXX."   This letter has requested we submit a "Software Assessment", reporting, "any software usage that ... may have been missed".   Please accept this as our software assessment.

To my knowledge, we never failed to submit a report, however we did submit many "zero-usage" reports.  It was expressed to me at the time, that our SPLA program was terminated as we had been submitting zero-usage reports.  This was an accurate and true representation of our usage.  This was not, as your letter indicates, a "failure to report".

We signed up for the SPLA program as we wished to broaden our support matrix for our dedicated servers and to provide support for Microsoft SQL Server as a complement to our Linux-based ASP.net hosting.   However, we quickly found there to be no viable market for hosting Microsoft offerings.  As such, we destroyed all software, removed references to all said software from our web pages, submitted zero-usage reports, and allowed the SPLA contract to be terminated.  I should note that we had paid for several months of Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server licensing during a research and testing phase, but for this period our usage was over-reported.

I should stress that we continue to advertise and provide support for web hosting powered by ASP.net.  This is offered on top of Linux via the independent Mono framework which only uses the ECMA components.  The technology driving the ECMA components are patented by Microsoft, but a grant has been given for use of those patents, allowing royalty-free usage as indicated by Jim Miller of Microsoft.  Providing this ASP.net hosting functionality does not require an SPLA license and does not require usage submission reports. Please refer to the following document in regards to the text of Jim Miller's statement:
  http://web.archive.org/web/20030424174805/http://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00218.html

At this time, as prior to joining the SPLA program, our server systems run entirely on the Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenSolaris operating systems.  We are extremely confident that we are compliant with all of our software licensing, which consists primarily of BSD, GPL, AGPL, MPL, and CDDA licensed code.  This compliance includes but is not limited to contributing source code changes back to the free software community.   Likewise, our desktop systems are also in compliance with all licensing, running Linux and Mac OS operating systems.

I understand your desire to be paid for the usage of your software.  What I hope you understand is that we are not non-paying customers, we are simply not, in any way, customers of Microsoft or consumers of Microsoft software.  Our membership in the SPLA program was simply an attempt to become your customer.  To date, we have been dissatisfied with the treatment we have been given in that attempt.  Threatening and attacking us will not succeed in converting us into customers or consumers of Microsoft products.

If you have any reason to suspect that we have improperly reported usage of Microsoft products, please indicate your reasons for this suspicion.  If there is anything we can do short of an audit to prove this to you, please indicate how we may assist you.  However, I believe that our service offerings very much speak for themselves, we are again, as we had originally been, strictly a Linux/Unix shop.

Regards,
Eric Windisch

UPDATE: 5/22/2009 - Microsoft has verbally expressed that this letter was a mistake and that they will be issuing a formal retraction.  We'll see when/if this comes, until then we'll wait patiently.