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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.
You mention the FOI law, but that has nothing to do with Microsoft. 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. End of story.
Microsoft isn't doing anything wrong, and it sounds like the college isn't either. I've pulled more interesting, and bloody, things out of my nose.
You want some bread and circuses too?
Wah!
I really don't care what kind of energy policy Bush has with Iraq. I get legal and cheap oil. And I don't care what you say about capitalism's evil business practices. But I don't see fuels that are amazing in the USA. I mean biodiesel is good and all but it doesn't even come close. I already pay the IRS thousands of dollars every year and if some kind of energy policy with Iraq puts cheap gas in my car I got no problem with it.
(Naturally the people who see no problem in the original poster's statements will see no problem in mine...sigh. See other less cerebral post.)
Ok, on this one I will bite.
College is for learning why not how, if you are going to school for how there are many fine vocational schools.
If you manage to graduate from College and are unable to apply your skills on a new software package used in real life your education is useless.
Isn't this why people Intern????
Probably a troll, but on the off chance that anyone thinks he's making sense, I'll respond. If MS wants to give the school a good deal, fine. Why do they need to keep it a secret from the taxpayers that are paying the bills? How is it good for me as a taxpayer to not know what kind of terms the schools I'm helping to pay for are agreeing to? How will I know if they've agreed to some horrible terms? If MS wants to deal with publicly funded schools, then it needs to be above the board and not try to hide anything from the public.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
How often do you actually check your local university to see how much they spent on:
Sorry to be blunt, but I believe your stance, though popular, is short-sighted.
Microsoft technology is the dominant tech today, who's to say what will be in highest demand tommorrow?
They're paying less to a known monopolist. What if they opened the information, allowing other companies to bid, and thus lower the price of software due to competition over the long term?
Microsoft is trying it's hardest to keep competition out of its markets, and I think decisions like that help them considerablely. Too bad so many IT directors can't think past the next budget cycle.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Um that's exactly the point. You don't *know* if you're getting a discount because nobody knows what anyone else is paying. There's no reference or baseline other then the (ridiculous) list price.
It reminds me of something a friend said to me. I was purchasing sun servers for the university I worked at, about 100k worth. The list price was 180k and I got them down to 95k... I was telling my friend that I had negotiated almost a 50% discount, and he said (sarcastically) "Gee, next time we should ask them to raise the list price even more so we get a better discount!"
Point being that ... if you have *no clue* what other universities are paying, how can you negotiate a good deal for yourself? I also suspect they want to hide draconian and quite possibly anti-competitive terms like "we'll give you 20% off if you teach your courses in visual studio"
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Excuse me? How can you be so blind?
The student council is paying them, and you actually believe that somehow that bill is not paid by yourself?
This deal actually makes everyone pay for the Windows licenses. It's just another way to pull money out of the Linux and Mac crowd by having them foot the bill for discounts that "benefit everyone". You know, crack dealers also give great discounts to poor college people to make them dependant on it.
Of course, if you think it through, you will notice that there is only one who benefits here -- Microsoft. Because people like yourself will now learn to use Windows and Windows based software. That in turn will lead businesses to use Windows, because that's all the new guys from college know. That in turn leeds to people believing that you have to use Windows because "that's what businesses use".
Oh, and I just love how you imply that everyone who has not bought a copy of Windows and Office is a pirate. I don't have a copy of Office. I wouldn't even own a Windows license if I could have bought my notebook without one.
Isn't it nice to know that if you did ask, they'd have to tell you?
Even if MS didn't charge the university at all, and gave every student free copies of all those products, the college and its students would still pay a price in giving away their mindshare to a peddler of proprietary, canned-solution development tools. Especially at an elite university like CMU, this is particularly worrisome.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
It's bad because MS is using it's unfettered Monopoly power to force (yes, force) publicly funded institutions to hide important contract points, despite legal prohibitions on doing this. MS says sign this agreement and break the law or you and your poor students will not only be buying all this software at retail +, and We and the BSA will also be by to do a full and comprehensive audit of every computer in this institution. And then we'll do another one. We'll let you know when. Or not.
And if RIT didn't have the shady deal with MS, maybe you'd only be paying hundreds every year, and you'd learn all about other amazing development environments that MS has now contractually forbidden you to see (on school time at least).
No anonymous coward, we never get tired of defending our
freedom.
DO NOT PANIC
Microsoft was convicted of abusing its monopoly. Thats not a felony. I dont even think its a criminal case. MS isn't even a person. A felon is someone who does something very bad and goes to jail for it and can no longer vote. You are mixing up your terms.
Its fine if you dont want to support MS, but at least sound intelligent when you choose to advocate that point of view in public.
It's up to us, as citizens in a (theoretically) representative democracy to participate in the establishment of rules to prevent such indecent treatment of their customers and competitors. If we don't like their masterful use of monopoly in one business to destroy all hope of honest competition in another business, then it's our job to speak up. Thoughtfully.
And we'd also better be prepared to compete too. (As a very happy Linux user and developer, I believe this is actually being done successfully.)
Perl?
Sparc?
OpenGL is a standard. Direct3D is an implementation without any standard. OpenGL has been (and even 2.0 will continue to be) backwards compatible (for more than 10 years). Every year-and-a-half Direct3D is completely rewritten. OpenGL has implementations on many hardware platforms and in many operating systems. Direct3D currently works on IA-32 systems in Windows, only.
commenting on the Microsoft monopoly.
Microsoft doesn't give good deals to colleges so they can raise the price on them two years later.
Microsoft gives good deals to colleges (as do Sun Microsystems, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM...) because they want their stuff in front of the people who will be making the decisions in ten years. Microsoft doesn't give software to colleges (or discount the heck out of it) because they want to leverage a monopoly-- they do it because they fear not being a monopoly in 10 years.
Microsoft often goes one step further: They'll foot the bill for some percentage of PC hardware if the college in question will promise to run Microsoft OSes on it.
-JDF
Don't like what your country is doing? Go to another country. Don't like what your ISP is doing? Switch to a different ISP. Don't like your college's software licensing agreements? Go to a different college.
This is about the most useless advice you could possibly give. First, there are few people who are likely to take it, because the proposed solution requires so much effort. Second, if you don't tell the college precisely why you decided to make the move, you haven't contributed at all to the solution. The administration will most likely decide that the best way to increase sagging attendance is to redesign the college logo. Finally, by leaving the college, you stop being one of their students, so they really don't have any reason to listen to you anymore.
There is a solution: It's called feedback, and you can do it without finding a new apartment.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
"MY highly priced college tuition to support a convicted felon."
Convicted felon?
Good thing you aren't going for a law degree... You can't be convicted of a felony under civil law.
MSWord is the standard
How can something which isn't even documented be a standard? Doesn't something first have to be known before it can be called a standard? The whole point of a standard is to facilitate interoperability of different implementations. If anything, MS Word tries to accomplish the exact opposite.
What you're thinking of is popularity. It doesn't really matter how popular something is, that won't make it a standard.
People with real CS degrees go on to form neat companies with technologies like Tivo and Google.
What your mistaking for CS majors are not "Scientists" but more like "Technologists" as a field. There is a difference. IMO, if it turns into a profession where your doing *exactly* what people tell you to design without using your expertise, you better only have one of those 2 year 'programming' degrees from a community college.
CS is what you make of it. Remember that.
Same applies to system administrators, but not in the same fashion.
In any profession, I think, you need to come up with goals early that you are working for someone and trying to gain as much freedom to do the best things for your employer under minimal supervision. If your employer won't let you do that on your own, theres a problem. Micromanaged workplaces suck.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
And if Microsoft did the same that would be fine. However, Microsoft is tying the price of their operating system and office suite to the acceptance of their development tools as part of the curriculum. Sun gave away their development tools and class materials, to pretty much anyone that wanted them, with no strings attached.
That's a fairly substantial difference.
If Microsoft were to give their development tools away to all takers then I wouldn't be surprised if some Universities used the language. However, that's not what this is about. This is about giving the entire University access to cheap Windows and MS Office licenses if the University will make sure that their CS students learn only MS technologies. That's pretty much exactly the reason that MS got into all of that trouble with the DOJ.
I went to Ohio State as a CIS student and worked as a sys admin there. They had a great program and I feel one of the best parts was that it was very UNIX centric. You got a better feel for the technical details of how the system and the software would interact as well as how flexable software can be. I can't believe they will be able to conveniently setup all of the tools on an MS client for the students to play with. Varients of any programming language you could dream of, code libraries and research code all accessable and usable from any client.
We also has a pretty slick setup to manage the desktops and servers in a fairly stable and efficient manner while still proving researchers the flexibility they needed.
I heard about MS software creeping into the evenironment more after I left, and they kept having problems with grads getting (and abusing) more authority than they knew what to do with on the NT machines. They will never be able to come up with anything as slick as the diskless client setup we had for UNIX. If a workstation did get hosed, we could rebuild it remotely and have the user reboot and up in under 5 minutes. Hardware could be swapped just as easily without changing the client's software, but it took long since someone had to carry the machine to the office.
I hope OSU isn't going to kill their CIS dept. I had been considering going back for another degree.
I mean, for chrissake. Anyone else remember the umich Mac freeware/shareware archive? Predated Info-Mac by a bit, but was excellent. Only notable thing I'm aware of about umich, too. :-)
And now they've made a complete about-face?
May we never see th
I often wonder how many Microsoft employees/interns frequent this forum.
See something you don't like about a beloved company and you want to restrict freedom of speech now!
And I don't care what you say about capitalism's evil business practices.
It's the humans, not capitalism, who have evil business practices. Let's place the blame where it is due. There are lots of honest and ethical business owners and employers who are overshadowed by the crummy ones. I pride myself in being honest, fair, and compassionate to my employees and my customers who, without which, my business and livliehood would fail.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Yes, because signing a contract with Microsoft allowing schools and students to buy useful software at prices they can afford is exactly the same as making a (non existent) deal with a genocidal dictator. Right-o.
Nonsense. And the fact that your post was moderated up only serves to demonstrate the sad lack of perspective in the Slashdot community when anything related to Microsoft is mentioned. Consider, if the schools had signed a similar deal with Red Hat, Sun, or Apple (and I bet some of them have) would this even be an issue?