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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).
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?