Colleges Signing Secret MS License Agreements

David Gerard writes "As seen on Yale LawMeme: Microsoft is requiring colleges wanting cheap licenses to keep their license terms secret (e.g. Ohio State, University of Michigan) ... in direct contravention of state public records and Freedom of Information laws." Many FOI laws have loopholes permitting state agencies not to disclose information when it would harm business interests, so what the colleges and Microsoft are doing may not actually be illegal (or could be argued not to be, anyway), but it certainly is shady.

Comments

That's why

[archeopterix]

That's completely the responsibility of the college - if they don't like it or it's not legal they can't sign the contract.

Aren't the colleges (at least partially) funded by taxpayers money? Hiding contract details is hiding information on how public money is spent. Visit Transparency International to find out why this is bad.

Michigan State University FOIA officer

[Animats]

Here's who you make a FOIA request to and here's MSU's FOIA price list. Here's a summary of Michigan's Public Records Act. There's no exemption that would cover a signed contract. Somebody in Michigan should ask.

large-scale EULAs are the heart of MS

[jtotheh]

MS's whole business is driven by large-scale EULAs, often cloaked in secrecy. Look at the Windows Laptop Refund people, they went to great efforts to get back the added cost of "bundled" Windows and I don't think anyone has gotten a dime.

They don't care about Joe Sixpack buying WinXP Home at ChumpUSA, they are after bigger fish. Like the country of India or China. Or every customer of Dell, Gateway, IBM, etc.

I think the budget items of a state university should be subject to some sort of FOIA inquiry, perhaps using state laws not federal. This is a really bad trend because when it becomes impossible to avoid paying Microsoft the "gratis" / free aspect of open source is nullified. If anyone in the states mentioned has the motivation they should pursue this with their state representative to bring these charges and their amounts to light.

An added bonus they have with their "free" Front Page copies (at one of the FAQs for the universities) is that they generate bad code for non-IIS servers * . Gee, I'll have to go download IIS for Linux once I'm done with this post.

http://www.oit.ohio-state.edu/site_license/mslic ense/answers.html*Is FrontPage recommended for use with my environment? Before purchasing or developing your web pages with Microsoft FrontPage, ensure the web server for your pages will be the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) running on Windows NT. FrontPage embeds proprietary and/or non-protocol-compliant features within HTML code, many of which are incompatible with many non-Microsoft web servers, including those utilized in OSU's OpenVMS and Novell architectures. The implications are twofold: o Web page creators can't just place FrontPage-generated HTML files in their OpenVMS accounts or in their Universal Disk Space and expect the web pages to work correctly. o Even if the pages are served successfully, they may only be fully readable by certain versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser.

the real issue

[bromoseltzer]

Until recently, I was responsible for software licensing for a number of university departments. The facts of life:

• Nobody is in full compliance without an institutional license (like these) and probably nobody is in compliance even with such a license program.
• The cost of full (a la carte) compliance would be enormous. How do you track 20,000 licenses among many departments, research groups, students, etc.?
• Anyone who thinks about legal exposure is running scared.

License administration is exceedingly unproductive work that everyone hates. So we had a pretty strong reason to pay MS's "protection money" and sign up for the blanket license. Even under the program, there are a lot of onerous provisions, as the FAQs cited at Ohio & Michigan show.

A courageous administrator (more courageous than I) would add up all the costs and risks and conclude that the rational thing is to go Open Source. Microsoft's strategy seems to be to extract all the cash from universities that the market will bear, without starting a rebellion.

All this has nothing to do with FOIA and everything to do with monopolists, institutional inertia and risk avoidance.

MS Agreements with lehigh

[philipgar]

I know Lehigh University recently (last year) signed an agreement with MS which granted a liscence of MS office and Windows XP to all the students. I found it completely wrong that I'm forced to pay tons of extra money to buy software I don't even use (as I'm a linux user). Microsoft loves the deals because most of the students either have their own copy of that software already, or would have pirated a copy from the guy down the hall from them. I imagine the main reason the universities agree not to give out the information is they don't want people to see how much they're paying to get copies of MS products. I imagine MS probably uses the threat of "stopping piracy on campus" as part of the reasoning to get the university to cough over the money for the liscencing. I hate it as much as the next guy. Whats particularly ridiculous is that I know people with 3 legitimate windows copies now. The one that came with their computer, the one the school paid for, and the one that they get from the CSE departments subscription to the MSDN (which is a great deal for both the department and MS as we get free software, and they get their software to be used educationally). Hopefully some day our administration will come to its senses regarding this. Philip Garcia Computer Engineer Lehigh University '03/4

Oracle is doing this too

[jfrumkin]

Oracle uses the same dir^h^h^h tactic with universities as well (and not just with states named California). At the University of Arizona, we purchased a site license for their product line at an enourmous price - during the process, they would not divulge (nor were we able to find out) their deals with other universities. However, I found out from my Dad, who is a dean at a university in the northwest, that Oracle tried to sell them the very same deal, but they turned it down.

Infrastructure Requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I'm employeed by an institution that has one of these contracts, I'm going to post as an AC. When we signed our Microsoft Campus Agreement, there were (substantiated) rumors that the contract required a certain percentage of our University-owned computing infrastructure to use Microsoft OSs. That doesn't seem too bad, until you realize that they were counting intelligent switches, Cisco firewalls, etc, it as non-MS products for that calculation. Of course, once the IT populace started getting hot about this requirement, the web-site was pulled are replaced with an MS-sanctioned page like those listed in the blurb.

from an Ohio State sysadmin

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a sysadmin at Ohio State.

Here's a link to the official OSU Microsoft Buckeye Bundle web site - quite different from the QA site linked to above.

One point to highlight is that if OSU sysadmins want to use the Buckeye Bundle software, we must also purchase an OEM Microsoft OS license - it isn't sufficient to purchase just the Buckeye Bundle. Of course many in the university believe this means we're paying for the OS license twice.

All of you who think this is a "great deal"... well, due to the OEM licensing requirements, unless you really need lots of Visual Studio .NET licenses, it doesn't amount to all that much less expense.

All State FOI Laws

[Bob9113]

I looked around a bit and found this helpful list of all state Freedom of Information laws.