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

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.

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.