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Colleges Signing Secret MS License Agreements

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the nothing-to-hide-here-please-move-along dept.

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.

4 of 343 comments (clear)

  1. That's why by archeopterix · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.
  2. Michigan State University FOIA officer by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. the real issue by bromoseltzer · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --
    Fiat Lux.
  4. Infrastructure Requirements by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.