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MS Pressuring NW Schools: Pay Up, Or Face Audit
razvedchik writes: "As reported in this article in the Portland, OR newspaper, The Oregonian, Microsoft is pressuring 24 school districts in the northwest to agree to their Microsoft School Agreement licensing scheme or undergo an audit in 60 days. Multnomah ESD, which covers the greater Portland area and has around 25,000 computers, has to either decide to accept the license at about $500,000 or undergo the audit which it does not have time to prepare for. Of significant interest is the fact that a significant majority of these schools are experimenting with using Linux. Multnomah ESD has its own thin-client Linux distro called K12LTSP."
This would be a perfect time for some large linux distribution company, or a consulting company to step in and donate time to help them migrate entirely to Linux. It would have to be a disruptive migration because of the audit in 60 days threat but they could do it.
You would think with such a large focus on MS right now they'd not pull this kind of crap especially in a tight economy and a region full of protestors. Should be interesting to see how this develops.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
It's about fear and control, nothing else. It's funny, and a little scary to watch them scrambling like this: it can only help the competition.
Not just schools, it's a form of retaliation against the .gov by microsoft, in response to the recent trials.
.gov M$ you owe us $15million
A friend of mine works for an arm of the VA (Veterans Affairs) According to this friend, the VA is being systematically searched by M$ for license compliance, so far with grim results. Supposidly the VA is about 20million out of compliance with M$ products. It doesn't just stop at M$ stuff though.
While M$ is doing their "sweeps" they will make it their business to report any competitors product being out of license as well. This includes everything from an over the limit shareware version of winzip, to "borrowed" installed copies of quicken, and the like.
It's pretty clear what is going on. The states that have fined M$ are owed money, but all M$ has to do is prove they are out of license compliance.
M$ We pay up when you pay us for our software
It's a pretty smart tactic on M$'s part when you think about it. It's not like M$ hasn't known for years everyone pirates their software to hell. It's just kinda funny how they use it as a trump card to save their ass.
So what the combo of less property tax and more gambling has done is shift the tax burden for schools from business to individuals, and disproportionately to poorer individuals, who tend to gamble more (this is not a value judgement, just a fact).
Also, Portland currently has the highest unemployment in the nation - about 9.5% last I checked. Furthermore, our Superintendent or Schools
I hope that helps put this quote from the article in context: The trouble is, if 60 days isn't enough time to audit 25,000 machines it sure as hell isn't enough time to convert them to Linux. It boggles my mind that Microsoft is going so far out of its way to piss people off. [Insert ob. Princess Cinnamon-Bun quote here]
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
> At the busiest time of the year for those
> districts, Microsoft is demanding that they
> conduct an internal software audit to "certify
> licensing compliance." In a March letter, the
> software giant gave Portland Public Schools
> 60 days to inventory its 25,000 computers.
To me, this sounds like Microsoft is threatening to have its goons "audit" the school at a time when the school probably can't afford the staff to do the audit.
> Ah, but wait. Microsoft has an offer it thinks
> you can't refuse, if only to avoid the audit: the
> vaunted Microsoft School Agreement. Under
> the terms of this agreement, a school or
> district simply counts its computers and
> pays Microsoft somewhere in the
> neighborhood of $42 per machine for one
> systemwide annual license.
If the school can't afford the audit, they can pay Microsoft a yearly tribute to not audit them, but they lose access to the software once they stop paying. And they have to pay for even non-Microsoft computers, like iMacs.
> The school districts are considered guilty of
> software piracy until they can prove they're in
> licensing compliance. If the district can't
> drum up the staff to manage the inventory,
> Microsoft is willing to show up with its own
> audit crew, but if a single computer is found
> with illegal or undocumented software, the
> district must pay for the audit.
I wouldn't be surprised if once they get schools into this subscription idea, eventually the annual tribute for Microsoft software for Apple computers will be higher than that of Windows-based computers.
Man, someone should stop them before they become a monopoly!
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
For good or bad, most of these GUI environments are pretty much the same, as is the common software which runs in them. Click on the picture of a printer to print, click on the character in italic to change the font to italic, etc. It's not very difficult to made the adjustment, in my opinion. Figuring out which option is on what menu can be a pain, but that's what Help is for, no?
Besides, if other schools are like the ones local here, all they're teaching is basic stuff that most kids could figure out in an hour or so if the needed to: word processing, spreadsheet basics, etc. Kids come into schools knowing how to use a mouse and keyboard and even if they don't it takes less than a day to teach them. I don't see a real threat to their 'competitive advantage' if they go to a school using Macs or Linux boxes in place of Windows.
The more I keep dealing with computers, the more it resembles a bad redneck romance: constantly flipping between "I love you so much!" and "Baby, why you gotta make me hit you?"
HAHAHAHA, thats funny.
Just go to your local school district, and say "Hi, would you like me to install linux on all your computers, for free?"
They will not want you to. Almost every compsci teacher in a highschool is either
a. convinced there is nothing but microsoft
b. anything but microsoft/apple is illegal
c. Linux is evil
d. Linux is hard
Trust me, I've tried. I brought up linux with the computer teacher at my school, and he said "is that that OS those freakin long haired geeks out in Colorado came up with?!"
I finally did get a full lab setup this year, cause I'm now the tech dude, but no one wants to use it. I made it extremly simple, huge netscape icon, and all they use it for is web surfing. From what I hear it is that the teachers are just to unfamiliar with it.
And don't even think about trying to reteach a teacher. Everyone I've ever tried to teach something to just stares blankly at me like "I didn't become a teacher to learn more shit, go the fuck away!" and either they ignore you, they forget, and the rare few that likes it do come along, but its rare.
If this isn't blackmail and anti-competitive, I don't know what is.
Okay, at the risk of sounding pedantic, go back and read the article.
Microsoft has essentially said, "J'accuse. You have unlicensed software. Either audit all your 25,000 PCs in the next sixty days (by the way, that's about 17 computers an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 60 days), or have us do it. If we do it, and find one - count 'em, one - computer out of compliance, you pay for the software you owe, plus the cost of the audit."
Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that they're fully in compliance with the licenses, with the exception of one PC some shmuck donated to them last week. Doing the audit is an impossibility for them. If Microsoft does it and finds the one PC, they pay (through the nose) for the audit.
Plus, it's not like Microsoft had specific reason to believe that these guys were out of compliance: the "random" audit, according to the article, targets "the nine largest school districts in Oregon and the 15 largest in Washington."
If a cop busts down your neighbor's door, you don't say "serves him right for stealing people's stuff," until they demonstrate that, you know, the neighbor actually stole something. Don't do it here.
Of course, that would dispute the reassuring reminder that "no information about your PC is being sent to Microsoft" (or something like that).
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
I don't know why everyone complains about Microsoft. They're certainly doing their part to promote Linux. I wonder whose product MS's marketing thinks their promoting?