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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
- 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.
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'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?