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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.
I really don't care what kind of agreement my college (RIT) has with MS. I got a legal and free copy of Visual Studio.NET. And I don't care what you say about Microsoft's evil business practices. But I don't see any developement environments that are that amazing for linux. I mean KDevelop is good and all, but it doesn't even come close. I already pay my school thousands of dollars every year, and if some shady agreement with MS puts Win2k in the labs and Visual Studio on my PC I got no problem with it.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Many are saying "well good for them, it doesn't matter if it is secret" or "having a cheap license is the important part." However, the entire purpose of these Public-Disclosure laws is that citizens (who pay for these Universities with tax money) should have the right to know what is being done with their money. A private University can sign whatever contract they want with Microsoft, but a publicly-owner organization has an obligation to _us_ (the people paying the bill) to tell us what they are doing.
Having secret contracts with a monopoly to use taxpayer-paid dollars in unknown ways is a dangerous business. For all we know, these contracts could ablige these universities to use exchange-server or block access to filesharing networks in exchange for getting and selling their software at a low price. For that matter, it could be a high price, no-one knows!
The beauty of the public-disclosure laws comes where any citizen can complain about the use of their tax dollars.
I go to one of the universities listed above, so I'll post anonymously on this topic. People here ask "Why does it matter what is in these agreements?" I'll tell you why it matters. My speculation is that courses are being changed as a result of these agreements.
For example, my school has a "Microsoft.NET laboratory". This literally is an entire room of a building dedicated to working on Microsoft.NET products. A course I am taking next semester that historically has been done in Java all of the sudden is now including C#; without seeing the syllabus, I cannot say which one is being emphasized more.
Secret agreements may be nice, but it makes me wonder what is going on. I wish I had a good compromise answer here; it's nice to let students get $1,000+ worth of software for less than $200 (which we can then keep after we leave school), but if the curriculums are being compromised in response, academic integrity and independance are going down the drain.
I go to CMU. MS Office XP costs $10. MS Windows XP costs $10. MS Visual Studio.NET costs $15. All these are without manuals, in tiny packages with a license for installing it one time (actually, the license is separate, and it claims it's illegal without a license, but the people at the computer store say it's a one time install).
Anyways, this cuts down on piracy on one hand. On the other hand, I'm seriously bothered by the fact that they are using MY highly priced college tuition to support a convicted felon.
What's really sad is that there is a Microsoft club at my university called MSImpact, supported by MS (and the girl who runs it is paid by MS to do this, she interned there one summer and has some sort of deal right now).
>so what the colleges and Microsoft are doing may not actually be illegal (or could be argued not to be, anyway), but it certainly is shady.
What they might be doing is offering different universities packages at different prices.
When the terms of the contract MS was pushing on public schools was brought to everyones attention, there was a pretty big uproar. Remember - MS forced the schools to pay them for licenses for ALL PC's in the district whether they actually ran Windows or not. The effect of this practice is to hinder the ability to buy Mac's for - say the graphic arts department or even use donated PC's to run Linux or anything else. Makes you wonder just what kind of "deal" these schools are getting and if they are possibly anti-competitive.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
Microsoft had an agreement with Industry Canada's
Computers for Schools program. It was also secret. I got a copy under Canada's Access to Information law, though no-one was very cooperative.
There was nothing particularly disturbing about the agreement, although there was one funny part:
5. VIRUSES --- you acknowledge that the SOFTWARE may contain viruses and you accept any risks associated with using the SOFTWARE without recourse to Microsoft, Microsoft Canada Co. or the Government of Canada.
I think M$ is just plain paranoid.
Uhhhm, since most colleges still use social security numbers as identification, and that number is on id cards and schedules, bursar receipts, school records, the borg now get our social security numbers when they audit? If not, how else will they verify that everyone getting the software at a deep discount is authorized to get it? I'll bet the phrase above was lifted straight out of the contract.
Nice.
It is not the responsibility of MS to be aware of the laws of each of the 50 states,
You are wrong, it is Microsofts responsibility to know the laws of the states it does business in, just as you are required to know the laws of the state you live in. I am sure you have heard the old saying "Ignorance of the law is no excuse".
"You don't need a weatherman/ To know which way the wind blows" -Bob Dylan: Subterranean Homesick Blues
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. You could teach a CS course with any functionally complete language that allows real pointers. You can even use Java, I guess, but you need to teach students about the machine that the code runs on then - the JVM. The concepts are all the same, or very framiliar. The problem is that the universities have sold out to people wanting to learn technology to make a quick buck, and not interested in the theory and operating principles of a computer. Things like interprocess communications, memory management, network theory..
If you have a solid grounding in your fundamentals, learning a new language is easy. Mastering a language takes years, but once you've mastered one, moving between them is not a problem. Unless, of course, you don't have a solid grounding in the basics. When I was in school, we used Modula-2 for all of the intro programming courses. You could use C or modula for the software engineering courses (2nd/3rd year). Most of the higher level courses let you use what you wanted. I didn't expect the school to teach me to be a Java programmer. Now, the school uses Java in those intro courses. This is very confusing to newbies, and has resulted in a pile of engineers (who take the CS courses in 1st/2nd year) that need to be taught what pointers are in another course.
Universities should be ashamed for selling out like this, because the focus on theory and fundamentals is what differentiates University from a technical school. There is nothing wrong with a technical/hands on approach, but the two are designed to accomplish different things.
The above nonsense with Microsoft is why I took engineering in University and not computer science. The hordes of people looking to make a quick buck and the adminstration catering to them was a turnoff. Nobody survives dynamics, analog design, digital systems and electromagnetic fields & waves and the like without understanding the fundamentals at some level.
Nothing against microsoft, but there's something to be said about teaching age-old information and not what corporation XYZ thinks is best for you, this month.
The title of this message is referring to a College, but most of the comments are directed at Universities, so I hope I have the distinction correct.
..don't panic
If you think it's less evil to use Java in a curriculuum you've got some serious morality problems.
.NET crap you want, and we better see this entering your curriculum or else you lose your discounts and we audit your asses.
I've seen this argument many times. ALL PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE IS NOT EQUIVALENTLY EVIL.
LESS EVIL: Here, have all the Java crap you want.
MORE EVIL: Here, have all the
Do you see the difference?
Java is, IMHO, a really really awful choice for a teaching language.
As a matter of fact, I have serious doubts about an OO language *period* as a first language.
What I've pretty consistently seen is people getting started on Java having to deal with a pretty high up-front cost. They have to get OO architecture, a ton of terminology, protection, and casting shoved down their throat before they can really write simple programs (more than Hello World).
What I've seen in a lot of intro CS classes is that the profs try to teach all the terminology and concepts first (in a pretty abstract manner) so that they can use the terms, and then start teaching the mechanics of the language. Everyone promptly gets lost.
BASIC was a really great language to get people programming in, because it was so incredibly simple to start someone coding reasonably well. You could teach everything needed to write a full-blown program very quickly, then spend time building on a concrete foundation, instead of a bunch of abstracts.
Pascal is pretty simple that way. C is a pain to debug and has a few syntax warts (the syntax of the for loop, the printf syntax...), but it's almost as good to teach things to students with. C++ is only usable as a first language if it's used pretty much like C at first. If you start introducing the entire language up front, you lose a lot of people.
Some people have promoted Scheme as a good first language. I personally think decent static typing is pretty important to someone that may be making type errors left and right, but Scheme is still probably not a bad choice.
Anyway, like I said, Java is a truly shitty language to introduce someone to coding on. It's (potentially) a really sexy language to someone that has a C++ history.
Personally, I'd say that a procedural version of BASIC is probably the best sort of intro language I can think of. Very low cost to entry, not a lot of concepts to bang your head into.
May we never see th
They said...
>>One of the few joys I had rubbing Mac OS X in my advisor's face
>You see, this is why I'm anti-Mac. Well, one of the reasons. Mac people pretend to be better than me. That really pisses me off.
Though you may think that's the case, think about what Mac and Linux and OS/2 and Amiga, and Atari 2600, and TRS-80 users go through every time they have to listen to a Windows user extolling either some amazing, new, innovative feature in Windows that the rest of the world has had for years, or a dozen other similar conversations along similar lines.
Now keep in mind, I'm not accussing you of this. I am merely pointing out that so many Windows users seem to wonder why users of every other OS seem to evangelize their OS... and perhaps that's a big part of it. Tired of hearing the shit from MS, and Windows users who just plain and simply dont know better. It's not entirely the Win users fault, and I know in my case, I found unenlightened Win users more funny than anything... it's very much MS's and the media's fault though - and they I did indeed get very pissed at.
Of course, any response from me - because Windows wasnt my OS of choice, made me a zealot. This, by the way, was when MS had big shares in Ziff Davis, who used to go as far as printing MS pre-prepared "media kits" as Win95 reviews, even in 3 different publications in one particular case, 2 written by one author, the 3rd written by someone else... identical to the word though... identical also to the copy that MS sent us at CompUSA. Oh - and mostly false. True 32 bit, no more DOS, 4MB of RAM... I'm sure you remember all those early claims that MS made that were just pure bs.
So... people wonder why users of other OS's seem to lean towards zealotry? Perhaps it's because many Win users, without knowing better, have went far beyond that extreme... we may brag about what our OS can do, and probably did long before Windows could... but Win users brag often about what their OS is NOT (like stable, secure, fast, slim, non resource hungry, etc...), or about features that their OS had last out of the pack - because they believe the "propaghanda" (for lack of a better word) that they hear in MS ads and paid "reviews".
Again, nothing personal... but perhaps something every Win user should think of the next time they wanna get mad at the user of another OS for being proud of what their OS can do...
- Rob
(Heck, I'm still waiting for MS's promised 64 way cpu support - since 1995... )
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