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A College Without Microsoft?
An anonymous reader asks: "My grandfather is the president of a well-known undergraduate-only college of about 7,000 students. He tells me that an alumnus has agreed to donate $2.4 million initially (and up to $800,000 each succeeding year for 10 years) to the school for computer equipment and staff if the school agrees not to renew any contract and to buy no products or services (either directly or through an intermediary like Gateway) from Microsoft. I'm told that this isn't the enormous amount of money that it sounds like and that a change-over to non-Microsoft products would be costly. I think it'd be great for college students to use computers apart from Microsoft, but I'm told that the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students. Does the Slashdot community have any points that I can give my grandfather to present to the Board next month?"
so now they're paying people to not use superior software...
I've been looking for a school in (Northern) California that teaches Obj C as part of its curriculum, because I'd love to be able to code for the Mac. So far I've found none, although I have seen quite a few that offer Visual C++ coding.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
but transitioning from M$ware is not a cheap process. Sounds like a good reason to beef up on cs students. Oh yeah, liberal arts;)
I work in a Systems office at a univeristy, and understand full well cost savings over a students education. It is a problem that my office fights with all the time.
Perhaps though, Your grandfather is in a position to change this trend where the dollar comes before the student.
Perhaps, it would even be a good PR tool to boost enrollment in the future, bringing in more money and students.
Just a though.
My university, New Mexico State University, has it's entire Computer Science department running Linux. We don't use any Microsoft programs at all for our CS dept. We use it in just about every other dept (Journalism has Macs, if I recall correctly)
I think it's very nice. It gets us out of programming for just the Microsoft world, but a lot of students are upset because we're learning nothing about VisualStudio and stuff, which is what "we'll be using in the real world"
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
You couldn't even show your face making an obviously inflammatory comment such as that? *sigh* Why can't people post something intelligent, involving information and fact? If you have nothing to say, please don't bother posting.
"Owning a computer is like having your very own TV -- with a built in radio!" - Ed Helms
The reality is, the kids are going to need to know how to use Microsoft tools once they graduate in order to be successful in the real world.
Plus, imagine all the chaos as non-computer science majors try to struggle with Linux on the desktop in computer labs and so on. It will indeed probably cost a lot more than $2.4 million in the end.
This post might sound pro-M$, but it's not. I'm just trying to give the reality of the situation. Oh well, there goes my karma.
that they should put the good of the students ahead of any politics. That being said, the gift should be politely turned down. The best education these students could receive is a broad one.
That is, one that doesn't show any bias towards or against any one company's products. An education that includes zero microsoft products could be just as harmful as one that includes 100% microsoft products.
Fast forward to the first interviewer saying to a kid "What do you mean you've never heard of Visual Basic?"
This could put the students at a horrible disadvantage. Things really depend on their major, though. Anyone doing something like a CIS degree would get little experience of what they actually need, and that's working with Microsoft products in a Microsoft world. The deal seems something on the immoral side, too. What would you all be saying had Microsoft issued a deal paying colleges to only use their software in order to produce a workforce that can only use MS software?
//TODO: signature
Best to see if there's some negotiating room with this benefactor, i.e. set up and Open Source lab and fund at least one faculty position to instruct in the use of whatever the curriculum calls for.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Think about it... A Mac can do everything a Desktop PC does (multimedia, web browsing, etc) and a Linux machine can do everything a CS/technical student needs (C/C++/Java compilers, technical programs like Autocad and ProE). I think the most useless machines here at Purdue are the overpriced Windows machines that need so much security/rollback software that they are rednered useless 10% of the time!
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
1) If Microsoft did something like this, everyone would be screaming and calling the Justice Dept. It isn't right for someone else to do the same thing.
2) Taking all MS products off the campus would be a dis-service to the students. Do some of us like non-MS products? Sure. But when those students graduate and go to work, are they going to see a lot of MS in the workplace? You bet. To hide them from MS products for 4 years would be harming their education.
Chuck
that's not an alumnus who made his fortune by working for Microsoft.
Would you hire an accounting major that can't use Excel? A marketing/business major that can't use PowerPoint? A software developer who can't use VB? Many companies won't.
No sig, sorry.
OS X has proven to be a very stable OS and it gives you the UNIX underbelly to teach students how to program with free compilers, while at the same time maintaining an extreme ease of use for all computer skill levels.
Apple and OpenOffice would fill the void nicely in my opinion. It won't be as cheap as x86 by any means, but it could be easier to support and teach.
btw, this isn't a flame. I'm using Linux right now and I love it, but distributing it to total novices can be frustrating.
-----
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
This rabid, biased anti-microsoft stuff has got to stop. Paying people not to use their products? Thats a low.
The 'benefactor's' emphasis only on non-micro$oft
stuff seems sinister. Now, if he had said non-commercial or non-closed source products, that would have been something else.
-- Ravi
Have your grandfather browse this site for insight into the advantages of Free Software. This will allay any reservations the board might have about the viability of a total Free Software solution.
How much "alternate-os"..ok..linux..do you plan on using? Getting rid of MS altogether, in any capacity, is stupid. I don't have specific facts but I'm willing to bet that windows shop outnumber linux shops 10 to 1. So while it's great that they have all this linux experience, I fear the jobs will go to those that have windows knowledge. Not saying it's right, just saying it's how it is. Linux shops in honest, real world productive companies still aren't that common. And I mean true linux, nothing MS on the entire site.
I say prepare them for MS, it's the world uses, like it or not.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
You're not going to get an entire university to drop MS completely from the school for measly 2.4 million. Instead, try for a more narrow target. Something like "funds for the engineer school, if no engineering classes use MS products for classwork." Substitute for "engineering school" and "classwork" until you get a balance that is acceptable to both the donor and the school.
If you ask me it's completely ludicrous. No this is not flamebait, but the fact of the matter is, most students are very much adjusted to using Microsoft products like word. Moreover there are ton of resources out their geared towards windows and office. Yes there are exceptions and yes there are resources for people to start using non windows software. But personally I will not use anything but office 2000 or XP when I write my papers and I especially can not see the majority of my non CS friends doing to well without their precious windows.
You say its undergraduate, but is it a very compsci oriented school? Do they have to eliminate all MSFT OSed computers immediately or just not replace them? If the school, say, upgraded the RAM in a Windows box, would it be seen as extending a contract with MSFT? If the school buys Macintoshes that come with IE on them, are the violating the agreement? What if they get Linux boxes that ship with Microsoft mice?
My alma mater is approx that size and I know that kind of money wouldn't put a dent in their IT budget (yet for some reason they can't let me keep an email address after I've gotten my degree).
There are so many questions that need to be answer that its virtually impossible. It would seem to me the donor would do better to specify that the money be used for computers running open source software, as opposed to just "not Microsoft in any way", which is ambiguous.
A "well known" school with only 7000 undergrads? Uhmm, that's a bit small, don't you think? Sounds more like "completely unknown" to me.
Ok, back to the facts.
First, most colleges have a heterogenous computing environment. That's a big plus. Exposure to Solaris, Linux, AIX, Digital UNIX, Windows, IRIX, etc. is a good thing. It allows students to separate functionality from form. Windows is probably the most important, as it is the one that really LOOKS different. As an added plus exposure to everything is a marketable real world skill.
Second, what happened to using the right tool for the job? Sometimes Windows is good (sometimes even the only option). The same applies to pretty much everything else. If it can be done in many different ways equivalently, then why bother with the expense of changing when there is no merit? That's a waste of money.
Don't cut off your students by limiting their options pointlessly. That makes as much sense as cutting off the testicles of a race horse.
Why didn't you mention the name of the college? BillG would have went there on Thursday and donated licenses worth of millions of dollars. Your grandpa wouldn't have to worry what to say.
Honestly, one shouldn't limit themselves to ANY platform. Having Microsoft products is an important thing to have in a college enviornment since it is so predominant in the world. If anything, it'll give you more of an appreciation for what is not Microsoft.
I personally advocate a hybrid lab of many platforms which then is integrated together. If you eliminate all microsoft products, you go back to the one platform teaching idea, which isn't really good. Anyone who wants a real job doing real things in the future will need to be fluent in multiple platforms, including but not limited to those microsoft platforms.
Don't throw out windows boxes quite yet because they make you appreciate having control of your own system a lot more.
-gabe
Here is the list of things I would tell your Grandfather:
1) Qualified (i.e. not test taking wonders) MCSE can physically manage about 14 MS Servers... However, a qualified Linux Admin can handle (depending upon variations in OS release) from 50-75. Much lower people cost.
2) The Admin time saved can be either be converted to cash (fewer employee admins), used to increase support of University Departments and Staff, or a combination of the two.
3) No BSA audits, papertrails, etc. which does not mean that inventory isn't maintained, it's just that it doesn't have to be a resource and legal liability issue (read, cheaper to operate).
4) I promise to send my son to this institution when he's ready for College (about 17 years from now).
Admissions, tracking, telephone answering and voicemail, the all important DONOR, PLEDGE, and WILLS AND BEQUEST software packages run on MS Windows, and nothing else.
The fundraising package Raiser's Edge by Blackbaud Software is Windows frontend on Oracle. It's about the only package powerful enough once you get past 10k students. It's about $150,000 initial purchase, huge hardware and maintenance, and it's Win only.
Good luck if you can replace all those packages with Unix based stuff.
Hell, the only mail list processing software is Mailers+4 from Mellisa Data. It's Win only, I use it every week, it works well but crashes like crazy. They just released a Unix/Linux library, but it'll be at least a year before anything happens with that. And you can't run a college without mailing list software.
"the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students"
What benefit to the students?
The benefit to the students is making financially responsible decisions. Idealism doesnt lower tuition costs.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I was just debating with a friend of mine yesterday (a hardcore advocate of Slackware, if that tell you something about him) about our computer engineering department. I'm the secretary for our IEEE chapter and I admin the IEEE lounge computers (soon to be 3). They run windows. The rest of the department, however, runs *nix (Mostly Debian, with some Solaris). Anyway, most of the Computer/Electrical undgrads *HATE* the lab, because we're expected to do most of our projects in there after about 15 minutes of a Linux how-to. So we're not talking about your average Joe-user, these are some very, very smart, soon-to-be engineers, and they don't really like the system
Anyway, my point is (and my friend agreed with me on this), if someone has to use the compuer systems, you can't force something unfamiliar and inherently unfriendly on them. And trying to do so will definetely foster anger.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
You're thinking in binary. There are more options than Linux and Microsoft. Can you imagine people having problems running on Apple computers? Even OS X is simpler than Windows. Macs for the n00bs, Linux for the engineers.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Jeez, get Redhat, Debian, GNU, etc or someother Linux group/corporation to sponsor the transition! The publicity would be marvelous!
If he thinks that the board can actually understand long term economic investments, there's an easy answer for your grandfather: "We will never pay for software again." It's really that simple. At some point, never paying ridiculously expensive licenses for operating system software, office software, and all of the other Microsoft products that you need to buy to form a worthwhile Windows system, coupled with donations from this anti-Microsoft person and maybe a few others, is probably cheaper in the long run. They'll definitely feel an initial hit now, but in ten years or so it will probably work out to be cheaper than not taking that initial hit and paying Microsoft again every few years.
Also, I'm not a Linux user, but I'm told that Linux has a lot less processor overhead than Windows and can run on much slower systems. Doesn't that mean that they'll always be able to buy replacement terminals on the absolute cheapest end of the PC price curve?
If they're in financial straits, I'd say go with Microsoft, but if they can take the initial hit that they're complaining about, switching to Linux will cement their financial solvency in the future.
I know that Microsoft have an Academic pricing scheme, but what would the cost of staying with Microsoft for this time period? They have been trying to change the licensing model to a subscription based model. How would this affect the College's bottom Line? The other thing to consider is, if dropping Microsoft products would equip students with the skills background they need to be useful to a future employer. I am not trying to troll, but what percentage of companies will look for CS graduates with Microsoft skills versus Linux / BSD / Mac OS / Unix. Mac I assume is also an option as the pledge was just anti Microsoft.
We have the opposite problem where we work, we look for people with lots of Unix and find people with lots of Microsoft.
Apple offers a $50 discount to educators?!?!?!?!
The software that would potentially replace MS products could certainly be cheaper, easier to maintain (lockdown), and more intellectually stimulating than mind-numbing MS products. Unfortunately, however, it would mean poor preparation for a MS dominated work environment, not to mention the total amount of time wasted by students waiting for Open Office to load up on budget computer lab workstations.
Linux simply IS NOT READY FOR THE DESKTOP YET.
This is an entire student body, not just the CS dept we're talking about here.
The kids are going to need their MS Office with its Word, Powerpoint and Excell apps. No crappy Open/StarOffice need apply.
Not to mention all the apps they won't be able to use since they won't have Windows as their OS.
They are also going to have to use Windows in the workplace after graduation so they would acutually be BEHIND the rest of their generation once school is over. No thanks. No way. No how. Keep the GNU stuff where it belongs, on the server.
All in all, lets keep software politics out of college purchasing decisions. Buy the best practical, not idealogical, tool for the job.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
If the administrative depts of the school are running the enterprise apps on Microsoft, the integration, training, and support costs of changing over will eat most of that $2.5 mil. A *somewhat* analagous situation is the Cal State system's moved to CMS, an enterprise management platform from PeopleSoft. High costs, integration challeneges, lots of resistance, etc.
Switching an entire CS department = good idea.
Switching an entire university = don't bother.
A couple things occur to me:
- If you're going to say that you can't buy anything from Microsoft, even from an intermediary like Gateway, you have already drastically limited what you can buy. Why? Because most manufacturers OEM Windows. Fewer machines without it means fewer choices, and probably higher prices for your Univerisity purchasers. This alone could offset the money you get.
- What of continuing support for already deployed applications? Is it a breach of this contract to buy additional client licenses for an Exchange server or for Windows file sharing, if quota for such is exceeded?
Last,
- What of those who cannot switch to a free or alternative software package; like your IT department whose entire network map is done in Visio, and would take a week alone to retool?
I like what this person granting the money is trying to do, but I suspect the fine print is a killer, and makes the overall deal unrealistic and costly. Maybe if this person can lay down more realistic stipulations, like that the computer labs facing students aren't Microsoft...
(For that matter, can they just fill the whole school up with Macs? Can they run Office?) They WHY of this grant isn't well explained...what the granter intends to accomplish.
From the post: "...I'm told that the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students."
So, this is not about what's good for the students? Ok, so this is partisan, anti-Micrsoftism, at it's best then, yes? Looking at base of cost alone might be ok but perhaps they're not aware that MS does provide huge discounts to educational institutions (educational institutions get special pricing from MS.) If a University is so hell-bent to not assist their students, to not do that which is in the best interest of the students, then clearly this is a University I'm glad I did not choose to attend.
It seems to me that a college without Microsoft is just as bad, or worse than one without Linux.
Lets just ignore for a moment that certain software is only available from microsoft - or at least that there are no comparible products from other supplilers.
By having no microsoft you are forcing everyone into the same mindset. Microsoft is the predominant software supplier, but that does not make their products necesarily bad.
University's are there to broaden knowledge, not to stifle it. This seems to me like a great way to stifle knowledge, and restrict achademic freedom.
I have been in the Linux community since the MINIX days, so I am not a Microsoft lover. I just feel that diversity is needed, rather than uniformity
Well, there are plenty of alternatives to MS products, many of which are actually cheaper. The best thing to do would be finding out (or at least estimate) what they do have in terms of hardware/software and so forth.
My college mostly used Sun equipment in the CS arena, and had labs of Macs and Win machines. The x86 hardware can always run Linux or BSD. For people who just need to type a paper up, there are lots of alternatives to MS Word on the Mac (Appleworks, Thinkfree, etc).
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I know it will be a little rockey at first, but no one said that they need to ditch thier existing MS products. Nothing needs to be replaced right away, only what is needed, when it's needed. Maybe in a year, replace the domain controller, etc. Also, I don't think they would be doing their students a disservice. Yeah, linux is hard at first for the administrator, but the students will not have to see any of that. If the IT department can come up with clever ways to use abstraction, it could be more comfortable to use than Windows XP on a Windows 2000 domain. At my school, I've see plenty of kids get confused everyday on an NT network.
I think $1,000,000 or $400,000 of that money is enough to buy linux PCs!!
What other decisions are for sale? Can I rename the athletic team if I donate enough? Decisions need to be made for other than monetary reasons.
Go to a school that has a good rep for computer science. It is easy to pick up any language once you know the fundamentals.
Since linux and a lot of it's programs are free, the only cost incurred by switching would be paying the technician/sysadmin to keep the system/network running fine.
Also, the learning potiential is definatly greater, because if any student wants to find out how a certain program works in terms of code, said student can almost always look and find out.
I really dont see how it would be costly to stop paying for software and switch to a free operating system.
With the donated money they could easily pay a whole team of lab techs etc to install and admin the *nix OS's.
You could even have different labs with different operating systems to give students a wide view on how things COULD be done.
Just my 2c.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Forget the whole CS department, think about the other students who use the computer labs. So far, every place I have worked has used Microsoft software as the standard. Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, and so on are what 90% of the business world uses I imagine, on Macs or on PC's. Putting out 7,000 students who can't use the most widely used work software and are used to something like OpenOffice that, while great, isn't what they'll be using in their jobs, seems like a horrible idea.
That said, the Microsoft products are just better to use for most people as well. They have features that everyone else is trying to catch up with, and keep innovating more than anyone else. Not teaching Visual Studio to programmers is one thing, but not using Microsoft products is a totally different one.
From this article, it was implied that students are at an advantage by not using MS products. Anyone care to explain this one? I understand it was a troll, but still, what's up with that?
...
Refuse. Not just because of the students who are going to enter the real world, and need to be fluent in the Microsoft products that, like it or not, are the cornerstone of business. Don't do it because your faculty and administration already knows Microsoft products. I assure you, it was a headache to get your faculty and admin as computer literate as they are, however literate or illiterate that might be. It will be fifty times worse to change them over to something new.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
No offense, but do you want to deprive the students of the skills they'll need to function in the real world?
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
Mac is probably a more viable choice. Although I don't think the $2.4mil can justify the switch.
Although here is slashdot, I would still say Linux is not a solution for desktop computing.
For an educational establishment this sort of thing seems out of place.
That's like making a donation with the condition that the college will not have books or ANY material by a particular author.
doing fine. The school I went to only taught on unix/solaris/linux. We never once used Visual C++, Visual Basic, etc... I have a job and am doing fine. It doesn't matter what system you learn on, other than GUI programming, or even what language for the most part. I can pick up a new language very quickly, because it's just syntax, the actual design and architecture of your program is what matters.
I think this "donation" should be rejected as a matter of principle. I would have no objection to a donation specifically for promoting Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) on campus. But this practice can lead to a case of university policy being sold to the highest bidder. Would it also be ethical for a college to accept a donation from the religious right on the condition that it defund LGBT support centers and women's studies courses? Would it be ethical for a college to accept a donation from the "boycott france" wingnuts to defund French courses?
One could make the argument that learning exclusively non-microsoft technology is detrimental to a student's education. Microsoft has 30% of the web server and 80-90% of the browser market share.
Imagine being interviewed for a job and having to answer 'no' when asked whether you have any experience developing for or troubleshooting the Microsoft platform.
If cost is really the only thing that's preventing the school from switching to other platform, then a more reasonable offer would be that the donation would go to support only non-Microsoft products, but the school should still be free to buy Microsoft products with the rest of its money if it deems appropriate.
There is of course an initial cost of switching to a different platform, but the initial offer of $2,4 million should cover most/all of that cost.
Switching to a different platform could however save them some money in the long run. MA Dept. of Revenue consider Linux as a more cost effective solution, so your grandfathers college could end up actually saving money in addition to the grant becoming an extra income.
http://virtuelvis.com/
If it was me, I wouldn't stop at agreeing not to renew / buy Microsoft crap. I'd go so far as to throw away all the Microsoft based crap on campus and replace it with something useful. Sure, this money might not sound like a big fortune at first but it should be enough considering that with free operating systems, you don't have to pay for so-called licenses. The best part is that you can pick out some bright computer-savvy students and have them do much of the work, for money, of course. This would provide student jobs and a good learning experience. To make a long story short, getting rid of Microsoft crap is all advantages and has no disadvantages. Because Microsoft crap is all disadvantages and has no advantages. Know what I'm saying?
What advantage would this be to the students? What's wrong with using/teaching both Linux AND Microsoft platforms?
This sounds like the same 'bullying' tactics Slashdot readers bemoan every time Micorsoft offers discouted software to schools, but I guess because it's Linux, it's now a Good Thing (tm).
I know this isn't going to be a popular sentiment here, but I am suspicious of ANYONE who tries to limit students' educational opportunities.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
If he does take the offer he's stupid. Students don't go to school to be taught politics, that is the cult of GNU for example (stupid people), but rather to learn for the future.
It doesn't really matter if you like it or not, but I have been using unix(bsd) since the middle 80's and I would be pissed if I went to school today and I didn't use and learned the Microsoft tools, because you need to know them to make valid decisions in buissness.
I don't say that they should go 100% Microsoft, they shouldn't, but rather have a 33% Microsoft 33% Mac and 33% Sun; that's my opinion anyways.
Better to use many systems so that you know what works for a job, when you go to work in the real world.
wow, sounds like a great idea, but you will certainly need some skilled people to implement this system, and to keep it running. Most folks are used to windoze and have become accostumed to a low level of involvement with thier computing environment. When implementing an open source environment, Linux in particular, will take more people power and training to get it off the ground and working right.
Good Luck tho!!
Point out that that it's not just the operating system that will need to be changed. You'll also have to buy EVERY SOFTWARE TITLE in the non-windows version (assuming it exists); imagine the total bill.
Also, I imagine many departments use Office (Word almost ubiquitously, along with Excel, Outlook, Access, Powerpoint... all very common in an office setting), you'll have to find non-MS software to do all of this, AND train everyone who's used to doing it on Outlook how to do it on Eudora (for my experience working with NYU faculty members, most are terrified of changing fonts. Don't even begin with new software). What about all the data stored in Word, Excel, and Access files? Not only are you going to have to find a replacement software package, but you'll need one that can seemlessly import and manipulate these filetypes, or prepare for tech support costs like you don't know what.
Also, if "non-microsoft" is the only stipulation (which seems a little misguided, but it's not my money), go with Mac, simply for ease-of use. Although many students are comfortable with computers, MANY students and faculty are not.
Assuming they currently use MS products for any significant amount of work, it sounds like a nightmare.
--
fight global cooling
I'm not a Microsoft supporter. I don't *mind* Microsoft software, but I have other preferences really.
I use opensource tools every day and I'm a senior in electrical engineering. Honestly, not having excel on lab machines that interpolate with home machines and professor's machines would cause chaos. Microsofts app suites are pretty solid and widely used. It would be detrimental to go out to the real world and not even know how to use excel, let alone windows, etc.
You have to think about the kids who don't have computers in their dorms and have to go to the labs. What if they want their dad to proofread an english paper? What standard will they use? Will they know how to save it to a file that daddy can read at home in word?
This goes far beyond CIS...Microsoft software runs the general world of word processing and productivity apps. Yes, the alternatives (abiword) rock, but like I said, you have to think and the non tech saavy major who doesn't own a computer as well.
-gabe
$2.4 million is what, about $350 per student? You reuse the same hardware, you definitely don't have one box per students and those sneaky bastards quickly pickup everything that you drop on them, so training costs are only an issue with you staff. That said, I estimate you will have about $1k/box to get [mostly free] software and train or hire new support people - sounds like a very sweet deal to me!
Yes, and don't forget that your next year allowance won't be $800k, it will be $800k + savings from licensing, perhaps, more than that.
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
Bad idea.
Love it or hate it Microsoft is part of the real world just like Open Source, Apple, Sun, Oracle & IBM. I would much prefer undergrads get a balanced approach to IT. That way they can decide for themselves, and be able to see through the marketing when the actually have to work for someone else.
I don't think that it will fly, since business/commerce will never give up Office, and Visual Arts will never give up Macs.
Perhaps if the author had worded it "up to $10.4 million" instead of "$2.4 mil (plus up to $800k a year for 10 years)", my thoughts on this subject would be a bit different. $10.4 mil is significantly larger than $2.4 mil. I stated in my post above that $2.4 mil might not be enough for this switch, but $10.4 mil? Perhaps.
All I ever wanted was an honest week's pay for an honest day's work.
Sure there are points, but I don't think they all weigh up to taking the deal.
;-) ) win them over by providing a better experience.
Totally removing Microsoft from the University is bound to create lots of havoc.
Let's talk to that donor and get $10.4 million for a kick-ass Apple/Linux lab. Perhaps even prohibit the use of MS software there--on THOSE MACHINES.
But keeping it out of the University is overkill. You don't win users by forcing them to use your software (ok well MS does, but
How often do we hear about "the best tool for the job" on Slashdot. If MS comes up with a decent program -- LET THE DAMN STUDENTS AND PROFESSORS USE IT! Are you going to have a business school that doesn't ever show its students Power Point?
Further, making any commitment for up to 10 years in the software industry is just looney.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Which school is this? I want to attend!
Regardless of anybody's personal prejudices for or against any particular operating system or company, isn't is clear that a college should prepare students for what they will encounter in the real world?
I see this as being as foolish as saying "our technical school will no longer teach people how to service internal combustion engines because they are environmentally harmful". Electric cars may well dominate the future, but the current crop of students will graduate -- and perhaps even retire -- long before they become common.
And like or not, the current crop of students at "your grandfather's well known college" will graduate into a world where Microsoft still dominates.
That should be the end of the discussion.
We're not even talking large amounts of money. But even if we were, it's not something that should be done!
Microsoft shouldn't be the only option, but it should be at least one of them. For all their corporate shenanigans, they do have several products that are both well-used in the field, and some products that are *gasp* BETTER than the competition.
In some places, non-Microsoft products may be better - sell that on a case-by-case basis. Or better yet, offer both. My school has Windows 2000 desktops and Sun workstations side-by-side, and there's nothing wrong with that.
First, let me prefix this by saying that I am a strong MacOS X advocate and ran a dual boot Linux/MacOS 9 system before MacOS X came out.
I have always been against Windows as a system, but for some uses Linux and MacOS X just don't have the software support.
1) Learning how to program Windows computers with a windows compiler can be valuable. I am not familiar with the process, but that is actually a mark against me from a hiring point of view.
2) Not all of the software that some groups need exists. OrCAD, for instance, still doesn't have a version for Linux of MacOS X. Neither do several PCB-cutter control software packages that are in use--these integrate with hardware and would be a pain to replace.
Sorry, xcircuit + SPICE just doesn't cut it.
3) According to the Autodesk website, AutoCAD has not been ported to Linux. Do you really want to put your faith for these things to WINE? Particularly when they involve hardware integration? This also makes support flakey if something isn't working correctly "...go under your Start menu..." "Um, I'm running this under emmulation." "We don't have support for that configuration option..."
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
How small is this alumnus' dick that he feels the need to hold his alma mater hostage for a donation?
Yes, he's offering a lot of money, but colleges get far more than that from the alumni base as a whole.
The one thing a college doesn't want to do is piss off a group of graduating undergrads, because they won't give money in 5-10 years down the road when they're making bank.
What kind of a revolt would a college see if students couldn't run Word in the computer labs to write their papers?
Not to mention all the other software packages that are mandatory learning in many disciplines, but are only available (or affordable) on Windows. (I'm thinking stats packages like SPSS, I'm sure there are more.)
When alumni make my-way-or-the-highway offers like this, it makes the donors look like jerks, and makes presidents who accept them look like spineless beggars.
I work as a contractor for both the public and private sectors. I have about 100 customers. Number of customers I have running MS: 100%. Number of customers I have running Linux: 0%.
While I would much rather work on something that isnt MS, I also need to eat...
Try any Linux distro you want that comes with Gnome 2.2 and other stuff like OpenOffice, and you will notice that it's ready for the desktop.
...
Try RedHat, Slackware,
RedHat 8.0 comes with OpenOffice.
n0dez
The grant money itself is used toward non-microsoft infrastructure. Imposing that condition doesn't seem likely or fair.
Certainly money could be saved by not using Microsoft products, and assuming that the changeover costs would be acceptable, there is still one big question:
Would the lack of any Microsoft products deter more people than it attracts? That's really the big question, because while not being able to learn Microsoft stuff will definitely drive away a lot of people, it could theoretically attract a lot of the kind of people you want in your college.
It would be an interesting experiment, but I doubt that it would be an acceptable risk for an actual real-world college.
I don't mind if the Intro the CS classes use C++, Java or Lisp. I was looking for an upper division class that might have a focus on Obj C. So far I've found none, which is a suprise given Apple's traditionally large share of the educational market.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
I can definitely see the logic behind this type of request. Specifying non-Microsoft not only accomplishes the obvious goal of promoting Linux, but carries several other intrinsic benefits.
For example, the precedent alone would be astonishing. What kind of message would this send to Microsoft? Just as the global trend of governments switching to open source forced Microsoft to lower prices on related products, this might trigger a price-war in which Redmond is forced to slash prices again.
This would also force big steps in adopting open source in teaching environments. What better way to infuse open source with CS studies than to allow students to manage new labs where only open source is used? This creates a more well-rounded graduate: someone more desirable to hiring companies.
Finally, a move such as this would bolster innovation in general. Competition isn't only beneficial to the bottom line, but also to the development of better products. Innovation occurs much faster when involved parties are scrambling to out-do the other. When only one party exists, developers can sit back and enjoy the glory.
So, I guess what I'm trying to say is GO FOR IT!
In our CS department, University of Illinois at Champaign, we have a buffet of OS's. A few labs are linux, more are SUN machines (kill me!) and the rest are windows 2000. So if you are in progamming courses you get to use visual studio sometimes or play with gcc and makefiles at other times. It's nice to be able to pick and choose depending on what your are doing that day. Though I'm sure that supporting this setup is a pain. :-)
If anything I think such an agreement would detract from the education a student recieves. Part of the education process is to expose students to the myriad of choices and have them practice making decisions. Removing one of the options can only weaken their ability to make similar decisions once they are in the workforce and have to decide to go MS/nonMS for a given solution. How would you feel if MS made the opposite offer?
At my university (Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany) most of the computers in the CS department are Linux or Sparc stations. Thats what the students do most of the work on and thats also what most of the stuff uses. In anyway we have Windows machines for several good reasons I think.
:-)
:-) than you won't have many problems using Visual Studio. You won't master all its features, but you'll come to it when you need them.
First, there is a public Windows NT computer pool for the students which is used for several things courses which depend on Windows Software. Chip design comes to my mind. We use the Altera Max circuit design software and the corresponding PGA chips to develop 4 bit processors in the 2nd year. It is free for students to use at home.
Second, try to find a good secretary who knows how to write a text with anything else but Word. I guess you will have troubles doing so. Professors (and students likewise) depend on the secretaries
Third, of course students should have access to as many different platforms as possible. We also have a public Mac pool with a couple of PowerMacs.
Last but not least, many other departments than the CS people will have to learn how to do stuff on Windows because in fact that is what they'll have to use later anyway. For CS people it's not a big deal if you have never seen Visual Studio in your courses. If you know what a compiler is and how to debug (and what a stack is
Economics or business students just learn how to use Excel and Powerpoint. You can laugh about it, I do so too at times, but in fact, that's what suits them best. They will simply not have a choice when they start at any company.
Ten years is a long time in software terms. Who knows that can't-live-without products will come along 3, 4, 5 years from now? What if MS bought Adobe? Or Apple? Why cut yourself and 7000 students per year off from learning and using the best that world has to offer, whoever it's from?
I don't care how much money you donate, you shouldn't be allowed to set the agenda for 7000 students for 10 years. Try to reason with the Alumni, but be prepared to let the money go.
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
I have to wonder about the wisdom of trying to bleed Bill Gates dry by paying people to not use his stuff. Seems like we'd run out of money before he would.
Tell the donor to support something constructive, such as making a donation so the university can produce some Free Software, which others can then benefit from. That would serve the cause much better.
I can't imagine going to a school that won't let me bring video games...
($2.4 million initially) + (10 * $800K) = $ 10,400,000. That is definitly a lot of cash. You will have to look at the big picture though. On the one hand, moving the school to some free software product will save on the licensing costs, but the project will also cost a significant amount of money (think of Unix-admins (which are notoriously more expensive than MCSE-people, which come free with every gallon of milk you buy at your local Wall Mart), training for both staff and students, etc.). Of course, another opinion is lurking around the corner: it isn't very hard to imagine a situation in which you just call OpenOffice.org Writer "Word". Most essays and papers don't contain very difficult Word-only stuff anyway (I am a Ph. D. researcher myself, so I read a paper every now and then). My guess is a lot of people won't even notice ("Hey, this is a neat version of Word, it looks cool. Nice birds. Starts a little slow though. Oh, what the heck.")
But let's cut the crap. What I am trying to say is you will have to evaluate your specific situation a bit deeper. What do people need to do on those workstations? Is there some program everyone ab-so-lutely _needs_ to use which only runs on Microsoft OS? Can the school aford taking point in this, or would it be better to let others do the scouting? From personal experience I can tell you, that it is possible to do academic work on Linux workstations. Even as a lawyer. (Yes. I know. Yes. I am sorry. Yes.) And if we can, anyone can!
To put an end to this: almost two-and-a-half million dollars seems to me like enough to migrate a whole lot of computers with. Not needing to buy new MS-ish licenses, you can spend the 800 grand the following ten years buying new workstations AND paying admins. Probably won't be enough, but if you add half your anual budget you spend NOW to that, I think it might be. Seems like you have nothing to lose: go for it! (After doing some more math of course. You can never do enough math in these situation. We need more math. Math! Math! Math! Basicly, my guess is, that this is just a simple equation...)
1. The university obviously currently has an IT budget. This money would be in addition to the IT budget. So the question is, if the IT budget is X, what could they get done with X + $800k ??
2. The switch doesn't have to happen overnight. Computers become obselete and are eventually replaced. It's only the *replacements* that need to be non-Microsoft. I don't see anything here to suggest that if they decide to accept this money the next day they wake up and throw out all their computers.
Can't you see this Ask Slashdot is a total troll? The situation is as follows.
Geek #1: I'll bet you ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS that you can't post an Ask Slashdot question that will get regular Slashdot constituents to propose a non-Linux solution.
Geek #2: One hundred dollars, eh? JUST WATCH ME.
And so we have today's Ask Slashdot.
'Tis true.
To buy...ever? Or to buy with the 2.4 million?
In any event, as with pretty much ANY ultimatum, the answer should be 'No, thank you.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
"How will the university provide a professionally-relevant education when you will teach students without using the de-facto stanadard tools of the trade in use by a great majority of employers?"
and (along the same lines):
"What will your answer be to a prospective employer of our students when he asks you why our accounting students have not mastered basic accounting tools such as Microsoft Excel?"
Very good idea,
;-)
If every studen would be given a full commercial distribution, there would be leftover 1.7 M$ for hardware and consulting. But as I know there are educational and mass discounts from the distributors.
As it is a college, it should not be too difficult to do most of the consulting in projects so that it's learning by itself.
Furthermore you don't need to migrate every two to three years on the command from Redmont. 800k$ pa are a lot of money for keeping the systems up to date. Remember: for the update you pay only the internet traffic.
So I wish I would have been at a college with supporters with so good ideas.
Greetings from merry old Europe
How is this type of offer any different from Bill Gates doing the same for a school, government or non-profit? This is no different then MS donating millions to the University of Waterloo in order to make C# the default language taught in E&CE courses. A deal that was on hold last time I looked.
you have a problem, particularly for your CS department. Ask them for their ideas on this. If you forgo any MS products you basically tell them they can't teach how to use MS technologies.
As much as I love using Linux and BSDs, I can't see them accepting this, because the conditions essentially forbid them from preparing people for encountering MS products outside of work -- it's going to blindside students badly.
On the typical arts college side of things I don't think this will bite so much -- you can still use Macs or PCs.
The cost of switching? You save a shedload on software licenses, possibly a bit on labour and maintenance (assuming that you hire fewer Unix or Mac people at a slightly higher per person cost), but the attractiveness of avoiding MS stuff for your potential students is bloody questionable. (I'd want to talk to your college counsellors -- would they recommend it? In this job market?)
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
I think M$ products should just be taken away from people at any cost, especially people who need them, then they'll be forced to make something available on linux. Also, if college students learn only Linux, then the companies in the real world will be forced to switch to linux b/c nobody knows how to support M$. People switching to linux can only be a good thing, forced or not. I don't care what people say about monopolies and morals and such, I want to use linux, and I want everything I want to be available on it, so I want everyone to switch to linux and make it for me (I'll help too). I'm being serious here. The whole "we need this windows only program" problem can only be fixed by forcing people who need that program to switch to linux, otherwise, in true human laziness, that program will never be available on linux, or at least not anytime soon. I don't care about anything but my ability to do anything I want on linux, that said, I'd be happy if someone came out and shoved linux down everyone's throats. And if I liked windows I'd feel the same way about M$ shoving windows down everyone's throats. So, lets get on this, force people to use linux, and make me a happier person. Thanks
Frag 'em all...
Microsoft spends resources traveling to schools preparing to select computers and threaten a "bend over, spread your cheeks" license check if they aren't selected. Now, someone else is playing the same game, but with slightly different rules. Does it matter? Microsoft doesn't dare counter the offer or every school will find ways to get Microsoft to share some of the wealth. Perhaps if Microsoft weren't so good at the role they play of the "800-lb. gorilla" (to the point of being the only nominated candidate come Oscar time) there wouldn't be so many people visualizing a bullseye on them, hoping the karma comes sooner rather than later.
well you could use Macs as well as Sun equipment.
1. Students - Many colleges have a deal with Microsoft so that any of their students can get various MS software really cheap. For example, get a copy of Windows XP and Visual Studio for $5 per cd. Losing that would be bad when competing with other colleges that offer it.
2. Staff and Faculty - I work at a fairly small university but we're large enough to have people who insist on using what they're familiar with, whether that's Unix, Windows or a MAC.
3. Software and Administrative systems - Most of our Administrative software isn't exactly friendly to OS's other than Windows.
While I'm all for promoting Linux, I'm also a person that believes in using the best tool for a particular task and in some cases that's a Microsoft product. I think requiring a college to not use anything from Microsoft would be more of a detrement than $800,000 per year could make up for.
And while you're at it:
- Sell more of your school's decisions to the highest bidder. Next thing you know, the NFL will be paying you to drop your basketball program.
- Instead of finding a balance between Microsoft and *nix-like systems to teach students, FORCE THEM to NOT use Microsoft. Yeah, way to go. Narrow their possibilities of getting a job instead of doubling them. Does the "deal" include banning any commercial software of any type as well? If yes, all the more stupid. If not, then you're not pro-open source, you're just plain stupid anti-Microsoft. Hey, get your granpa a Slashdot account. He'd be a great fanboy.
- Be prepared for students either not joining or simply dropping out and moving to other schools. Here's a free clue: not everyone in the world is rabidly anti-Microsoft.
BTW, I call bullshit on this one.Mod away. I'll go back to the journals now.
Users won't understand Linux enough to be able to install P2P apps such as Kazaa, and so on, so the school saves tons on bandwidth alone. Not to mention the difficulties of setting up Quicktime players preventing downloading of large media files...
MORTAR COMBAT!
that allows for a small percentage of ms products indefinately. If they still refuse, fuck em, they obviously care more for the agenda then for the school.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
If this undergraduate school is primarily a Liberal Arts institution with small CS/Math/Engineering departments it's a tough call. In my view a non-tech major will have little patience to learn another OS like Linux. On the other hand tech majors will accept it much more willingly. At my university which consists of 40% engineering majors Unix is widely used. But if you go to the other part of the university Windows rules and probably always will. To get the other part of the school to switch would have to be preceded by common businesses switching to *nix. An MBA student will not be seeing *nix at work when he graduates.
Where the Music Matters
I went through an entire CS program without ever directly using a windows-based technology.
Sure, we used NT workstations, but that's mighty quick to learn and most people know that anyway. Furthermore, with cygwin, it's as easy as extending your knowledge about X.
However, we used Java, and C, and other languages that were either free (beer) or free (libre).
The problem is a little more disconcerting for MIS students. However, how many programs do you know that teach troubleshooting skills, anyway? Usually, it's more business-oriented.
What I would suggest is asking the alum to further describe his vision, and how hee feels it can be accomplished without sacrificing the general quality of education.
___
That said, The cost depends on your current licensing structure. Assuming you don't have any renewable licenses, that all can be slowly transitioned.
The methodology you need is
1. The cost of new servers to avoid licensing issues.
2. the cost of training. (Faculty, student)
Macs or *ix/X servers?
3. If you plan on an *ix/X based technology, the cost of customizing a distribution and making an X desktop that minimizes transition anxieties will pay for itself.
The real answer is to engage the alum and have him help with the vision.
Nowithstanding the real-world need for students to know how to use Excel, etc., the real problem lies with the "indirect" part of the agreement.
We all know how hard it is to get name-brand x86 machines without some version of Windows installed, and if you don't want it, how hard it is to get a refund for it.
Sure, you can buy Macs, or you can buy branded x86 machines with Linux (etc.) from a number of vendors, but your choices are limited and except for Microtel, they tend to be pretty high-end. If you had to outfit 7000 students plus the proportional amount of faculty and staff with low-cost MS-free machines, you'd probably be buying a lot of beige boxes. (Either that or you've just found another way to enslave the grad students.)
Also, what about machines the students bring? Is it realy practical to think that the college's IT department can completely disavow support for all those Windows machines on the dorm networks?
The college experience is about choice. Students and professors should be free to choose what platform suits them best.
I used a Unix/Linux machine for all my CS work. I would not have chosen to learn on a Windows machine. Others will chose differently. You must give people the opportunity to make choices, good or bad.
I can see quite a few stick-in-mud professors getting a little angry when you tell them their curriculum. Choice is more important.
If I had something intelligent to say, I would have said it.
Give them a minute, you'll be getting people telling you that *you* should just write that software for linux.
Tell your grandfather to tell the alum, Scott McNeeley that in order for the doantion to ge accepted he has to donate and least five times as much in Sun Hardware and StarOffice licenses.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Perhaps the board should view these conditions in terms of cost to their control. What happens if next year Microsoft themselves offer an award to the same college with conflicting preconditions?
Additionally, it's probably morally questionable for an educational body to allow itself to be "guided" in this way, financially tempting though it may be.
And that's from someone who regards Microsoft as a Dark Force.
I have a few points to make, so bare with me:
1) As both pro-microsoft and pro-linux user, I am inclined to believe that this could cause alot of negativity toward Linux. Just like an "anything Microsoft" shop makes pro-linux users cringe, an "anything BUT Microsoft" shop would make someone like me cringe, and I'm pro-linux. I just use both OS'es to the best purpose. 2) College is supposed to prepare people for a career in their desired field. There are benefits for CS majors to have Linux machines, just like there are benefits for NON-CS majors to have Windows machines. If you ignored the students needs, then word will eventually get out that that school is no good for anything. It may take 4 years (current students who graduate and try to get jobs). I beleive that the school would be doing a great dis-service to it's students (who should be more important than the board) if the went all linux.
I'd like to meet this person. Anyway, as far as making the case for acceptance: Show the board MS License 6.0. Highlight the "good" parts, and append some of the better industry commentary about them. Make it clear that, if whatever academic licensing MS offers doesn't already include these provisions, it will soon. (A reasonable assumption.) Run some numbers on the projected TCO of M$ software over those ten years. Be sure to include some reasonable extrapolation of past losses due to viruses & such. Then run the same numbers for Linux. With a reasonable effort, you might well be able to demonstrate to the board a lower ten-year expenditure for a Linux environment before taking the donation into account. Might not succeed (esp. now that MS knows about the proposal - thanks /. [G]), but at worst you'll certainly get a cost-conscious board thinking about open source.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
I'm told that the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students.
To have no Windows anywhere is going to cost the college a lot of prospective students who are told, "We have weird computers in our labs with Linux and they won't allow us to have normal computers with Windows because the college gets more money that way." And the prospective students are going to run away, confused.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
Microsoft Bad. Macintosh, Linux, BSD, UNIX good.
'Nuff Said.
Yes I would agree that most shops out there are Windows shops. However, isn't the point of an education to prepare you for what the market is going to be like. The market is slowly heading more toward linux. As it becomes more popular it is going to grow faster. You would be preparing your students for a market that is growing and will only get bigger.
Suggest to the alumn that you use the money to buy a linux lab. Any funds will go towards equipment and support for the new linux lab. That amount of cash really isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things (think five years down the road.. remember how much changed from 1995 to 2000, for example).
...than a campus taking millions from Pepsi to only have Pepsi machines on campus, and not Coke? Or vice-versa? Or if the unix servers here decided to only offer vi instead of emacs? It's a bad idea, regardless.
If the statistics are true, and 90% of those 7000 students are using Micro$oft as their platform of "choice", then they would seem to be alienating a vast majority of your students that are comfortable with a particular computing platform. Whether that preference is right or wrong depends on how much you hate working with Windows software.
I think universities should promote options, not restrictions.
It's one thing to offer the money saying that his money can't be used to buy MS products. It's another to use the money to blackmail the school into NEVER buying ANY MS product with ANYONE's money. Tell your grandpa that the guy is a jerk.
Your grandfather should tell the board that students that don't know how to use Microsoft products are useless in the workplace, and that therefore it is the college's duty to make sure their students are familiar with Microsoft products. Completely ridding the place of all things Microsoft is not the way to do that.
At the risk of sounding like a Linux zealot, I must ask - what is the goal here, education or training?
I guess I always imagined, (and my Lit professors consistently agreed) that education was an experience that was supposed to transcend job skills and give you something you couldn't get from a technical guide, training bootcamp, etc.
If you are any sort of computer professional, you are training all the time. If you can't handle changing gears in terms of the development platform you use, you are already behind the game before you've even gotten started. If, on the other hand, you've gotten some real Computer Science with emphasis on theory, you are going to have a framework of knowledge which I personally understand to be education.
If one were to recognize the need to get into the nuts and bolts of a system, free from constraints of filtering the information to remove marketing intent, and free from anticompetitive obfuscation and outright deceit, which would be the best option to look at if one wanted an education?
It seems like everyone one here thinks the only users of computers on campus are the students. You have to keep in mind that it's the faculty and administration that are probably going to have even more trouble than the students would.
;)
Think about it, the administrative secretaries that have used MS Word for the last X years and have learned exactly what the button looks like that does so and so would be totally lost if you just up and moved them to something so radically different.
Granted, if everyone understood what the computer was doing and what, for example, the magical thing called a "Mail Merge" actually tries to accomplish instead of knowing, I need envelopes printed so I click this "Mail Merge" thing, then everything would be a little easier...
I don't know if any of that makes a lot of sense to the people that haven't actually worked in an IT department, but as a current student and IT worker at a major university, you need to think about the whole picture.
Another thing to mention (which may have already been mentioned before I get done typing this) is that software is just a tool. It doesn't matter if you're running Linux, OSX, Windows, DOS, custom ASM kernel, etc.... all that matters is does the software you use accomplish the job and is it the best tool to use to accomplish the job.
I would really like to see just how much the CS world could accomplish if religious wars over dinky stuff like this never existed...oh well, until then, the wars are fun to read!
-Adam
Everyone has mentioned students but I don't think that should be an issue. Anyone can use OpenOffice. When I was in school we managed to use WP5.1 and it was no big deal.
The thing I would worry about are the teachers. My guess is that the teachers won't even consider switching.
If the teachers are willing to try, then I say go for it.
The only large organisation I know where no Microsoft software is used is Sun. Although some of the staff use Windows laptops - so even that isn't totally true.
Alex
I cant believe you people are saying this is a bad idea! Are you nuts? There are many good reasons to switch the college over to Linux: Frist there is a Linux distrubution for colleges called college linux and as such is free and geared towards teaching students about programming and computer languages. Second, Linux is by far less costly to maintain giving a college net savings over Windows Machines even without a donation. Third, Any institution that recieves any sort of public funding should be using open source software anyways. I dont want colleges teaching kids how to be MS or Apple drones. Fourth, any class that needs a specific application that is windows only, such as SPSS, can just use wine, winex, or VW to run that software anyways. Fifth. Some argue that students wont be prepared for the real world. I disagree. Microsoft has only 2 products that make money, and since they dominate the market, the only way to increase revenue is to raise prices. Liscence agreements are getting worse every year, and Office is expectd to cost $250 every six months in the next few years. I would argue that the group of students who have learned Linux will have AN ADVANTAGE over the others in the workplace (how much is an MCSE worth today anyways?). Most information they learn from Linux is easily transferred over to windows anyways, such as how TCP/IP works, or programming such as C++. Is the man voting with his money? Sure, but were talking an individual here, not a corporation. He has nothing to gain except insuring that the future of computer users will still have choices and not be all Microsoft. Perhaps the college and the donator could begin by funding a student organized feasibility and cost/benefit anlysis study. We have a question, we want to find out. Isnt that what schools are supposed to do?
Other than strong arming them into an alternative they might not want? Because the major ramification here, especially for a small college, is that they won't be able to support students' machines that are running Microsoft operating systems.
There's little difficulty in getting them to interoperate. But that the support resources -- help desks, IT staff, trainers -- would have to switch to linux/OSS. And that means that the necessary knowledge base isn't there to help people out. If a student is using MS Word on his laptop, and doesn't know how to do something, you'd have to tell him "we don't support Windows because it's too costly." A very patriotic phrase. But it doesn't help the student. Which means it doesn't help the school.
I'm not saying "don't use linux in schools." I'm saying don't put all your eggs in ANY basket. The college I went to had about 600 Windows machines, 200 Macintoshes, 100 Sun stations and about an equal number of RedHat machines. A lot of savvy students used the Sun and RedHat machines, and I don't mean just engineers. My wife, who wouldn't know open source from cold sores, used to use the $9000 Ultras to check her email, because they had these huge trinitron monitors and didn't have lines around them like the Windows machines.
The hodge podge of machines meant that we each had our own preferences and our own specialties. I think that's the best situation for a school; a technical equivalent to a "liberal arts" education.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I was expecting a bunch of posts written by zealots who thought this was just a wonderful idea. Instead the high rated ones make good arguments why being a MS free school would be a Bad Thing.
I guess what frightens me most about this gift is that it's an attempt to control the curriculum of the school by an outside force. I think this is the major point you grandfather should bring up. Teachers should be allowed to use the software they think is best for the job, and not controlled by some outside political interest with a lot of money. Would the school even be considering this if an doner would give money to the school if they didn't teach any courses about Islam? The analogy is a bit heavy handed, but I hope it serves a point.
What the board needs to understand is that at least in computer science, the software used is part of the curriculum. Letting someone with loads of cash set curriculum is just a bad precedent.
AccountKiller
If the donor is SO hell-bent on using non-M$, maybe you can talk him down to running a base Linux system with VMWare running copies of Windows (which, I know, would compound the problem somewhat, but I am thinking of planting the seeds of choice in every machine and giving the students the option of using Linux to experiment and learn, but still have the functionality and industry standards of Windows apps.), or using WineX to run Office and other necessary-to-normal-working-life apps? I am no expert on either subject, nor do I know that much about either of these solutions, I am just trying to raise good discussion points here.
Moving an entire campus over to linux is quite a task. Perhaps starting out with an intemediary like cygwin might ease the stress on both budgets and the learning curve.
Is it cold turkey, or bit by bit? It's easy enough change most servers (web, mail, etc) over to Linux/BSD/Unix, it may be more difficult to get desktops.
Are there any app.s that only run under Windows without an alternative?
Even if the college slowly moves over but doesn't get the full grant they should be able to get the higher reliability and lower costs of open source. This will save money in the long term even if they don't go fully away from MS.
That being said, if I were presenting this to the board, I would recommend against accepting it. It is too restrictive, and isn't a good idea. It isn't a business, it is a learning institution. The students are the ones that would have to go into the marketplace, and they shouldn't have this restriction placed on them. However, I would propose an alternate plan, and see if the donor would accept it. Maybe a "[insert name of donor] Linux Lab" could be set up with all Linux based machines. (assuming here that non-MS means Linux, I guess it could mean other things too). Or the "Free Software Lab". Or let the donor name it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
If I was in the administrator's shoes, I'd try to talk this donor into giving the money (or some of the money) in agreement to substantially reduce MS usage, not eliminate it.
I can't live without MS software, and its not for lack of trying - I doubt an entire university could do it for any millions (unless it gets into the billions, then they could just pay to have someone rewrite the MS software - pipe dream, now returning to reality).
This guy obviously has something against Microsoft. I'd explain that his no-MS demand is unreasonable, so he isn't going to be helping rid the world of MS by ofering a donation they can't accept. But a less-MS demand could be met, and would have the desired effect, or as much of the desired effect as possible.
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
A better idea would be to use the donor's 2.4 million for non-MS products -- they can agree to that -- and then use their normal budget for whatever else they feel is necessary.
So you can have 2.4 mil of Linux, Macs, etc., and then also have MS purchased with the school's normal funds. That way students will have Linux available, and if the installation is good, they will *want* to switch, as opposed to being *forced* to switch.
Down the line, the school will see what a pain it is to deal with the BSA, onerous software contracts, etc., and can phase MS out over time.
And guess what? Around town the use of MS is quite low, and people are quite adaptable to non MS solutions. All it takes is a fairly large group to decide on something else and everyone adapts. Sure, the first year might be hit by "You haven't heard of VB?" at their interview, but two years later you're going to get "You haven't heard of emacs?". There is pressure for students to adapt to what businesses want, but there is equal pressure for businesses to adapt to use the skills their employees have.
Oh, and I wouldn't go with linux throughout the school. Macs are just so much easier on the helpdesk, businesses already understand mac experience and a few prefer it, and the transition will be much less painful.
I'm told that the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students.
These aren't orthogonal. Where do you think financial aid comes from...the tooth fairy?
There is a reason why trade schools teach MS products: They let you get a product to Market FAST. Wizards, N generation languages, OCX component integration, etc. lend themselves to a high paced development environment. For the purposes of teaching, research and mathematical foundations such >4GL languages are actually detrimental to learning the art of programming IMHO. *nix based development environments are typicallly much more opened ended than something like Visual Studio. Through the wonders of scripting a program like XEMACS can let you develop efficiently in hundreds of languages. If you are working with VB, you can use...VB...maybe some c# and some scripting tie-ins.
Programming and technical students will learn how to use microsoft products on their own. It is more important to teach them the fundamentals using a wide scope. Not to say that MS products dont have a niche and a function even for hardcore programmers, but more often than not they seem to adapt an "the ends justify the means" attitude. Dizzying libraries rarely supply you with optimal code, but greatly speed the development process. Its a trade off I guess.
So let me get this straight, the board at the school will actually look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students, that sounds a bit fishy. Also, who is this person or group of people who decided to push all this money at the school if they not just bailed on, but boycotted MS products?
I think it'd be great for college students to use computers apart from Microsoft
So do I, but if that is really the concern, why don't you talk him into putting a few cheap PCs up there with Linux and some free software? You can throw together a perfectly adequate PC for under a grand, a bank of non-Windows PC would be very affordable, and available to the students. Heck, I'd love to see how many folks actually sit down at those (on purpose).
As much as I hate MS business tactics I would hesitate accepting a gift that artificially tied into unrelated decisions that should be made on their own merits.
I would concur that MS is bad, MS has an unfair monopoly. I would agree that henceforth I would no longer require students or departments to purchase MS software. I would agree that students be made aware of, educated and trained in the use of alternatives.
But after all is said and done, I would not prohibit any student or department from deciding to buy MS software. Let individuals do what they think best fits their needs.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You guys are a bunch of ass clowns.
Get a life.
I don't have any major beef with Microsoft and yet I'm a huge proponent of Linux, but I think these kids might be shooting themselves in the foot if they go to this school.
:P
Face it - there is a much higher demand for people who have a good understanding of Windows, than there is Linux. A lot of the technologies that windows server use are a lot more seamless on a business environment (in the sense that they can integrate with nearly any microsoft application) than Linux.
The cost of implementing windows servers is much higher, uptime usually isn't as good as linux, but yet it is just a much more practical OS in many cases - and that is just one reason why businesses use it.
I am speaking from personal experience when I say that this is probably not the best idea for someone who plans on being successful. I am currently doing PHP programming and finding new work doing PHP is almost impossible. ASPX is where it's at. That's just one example - I could come up with a number of other ones.
Go ahead - flame me (I know you all want to)
Choice is good. If it were generally known that the college were Microsoft-free, prospective students could vote with their dollars about whether or not it is a good idea.
If there are no Microsoft-free campuses, then there is no market for the decision.
I say go for it.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
On wethere you can:
Provided you have all the hardware you'll already need, $2.4m shold be plenty to make the switch, and then some. Most of the cost involved is going to be terms of man hours. with 2.4m you could have a full team of high paid uberleet linux guru's working around the clock for a year, and about 8 of those can become full on admins with the supplementary income. $2.4 million is ALOT of money when you're talking about using it in order to make the MS->open source switch. If you're talking about it in terms of being a bribe to switch to Linux, then it's probably not cost effective.
On wether you should:
I think this is a bad idea. Not switching the college over to Linux, but the blanket ban on M$ products. I think you could get away with having a weekend training course on learning the concepts of M$, but not a total ban. Like it or not, M$ is out there in "the real world", and while anyone who understands the concepts of computing can use Windows, the whole GUI experience can some time to get comforatable in. I'm am 100% pro-linux and anti-M$, but I am damn glad I know both well. This consistantly gives me quite an edge over most of the competition out there, not to mention makes my job a whole lot easier.
So I don't think you should take this bribe, from whoever it is. I do think you should seriously look into at the very least integrating Linux into your network, even if it's at your own cost.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
1. Users can be given accounts on all the systems, so that they can change their settings without disturbing others. Security can work without being suffocating.
2. Those people that would have trouble with Linux probably don't know Windows. Despite layman opinion Linux can work in such a way that clicking on pictures causes stuff to happen.
3. $2.4 million - $1/Debian floppies = $2,399,999 cash.
4. The 8 grand a year will go toward buying winshit licenses for the school board.
5. A professor or CS class could admin the servers.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I work as a HW engineer and the idea of just dropping off data to the API of a black box is not simply enough to ensure maximum performance of our products. I need to understand the system in detail in order to get high quality products. I would expect that even more necessary as a student
What needs to happen in this discussion is a separation of the need to manage a college's IT infrastructure vs. the flexibility to teach sound computer science. The two are (usually) mutually exclusive.
I used to chair a computer science department for a small private university. I had a M$-equipped box on my desk, but almost all of my teaching involved Linux or Solaris computers. Others taught with the appropriate tools to fill the need; MCSC courses naturally used M$ stuff. But we had the freedom to use whatever tools met the need, which I think makes for a more diverse and enriching experience for students. At the same time, we recognized the need for the IT guys to manage administrative systems based on a consistent solution, and for them it was M$.
For all you CS students out there complaining that you're not getting enough M$ or whatever, get over it! You're much more valuable to me as a prospective employer with a solid foundation in the computing sciences, sans vendor specifics: with that, you can buy the O'Reilly book to learn the latest and greatest, rather than taking more classes (boy, the admissions advisors hated for me to say stuff like that!).
Be it OSS or M$, what would be sad is for a school to bind their _academic_ computing infrastructure to either one. But the IT guys need to manage efficiently, or your tuition will go up (oh, it is anyway.....?)
The Case For OpenOffice
Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions (part 1 of 2)
Largo loves Linux more than ever (part 2 of 2)
How To Run a Microsoft-Free Shop
Reasons to Avoid Microsoft (summary and links)
Microsoft loses showdown in Houston
Making a Living Saving the Government Money
Those are just some of the articles I've saved. If you wade thru a /. search, you may find more. I found those particularly interesting because some of them give details of companies or goverment agencies who have moved to Linux (away from MS), and their difficulties and successes doing so.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I read everyone of these replies and the majority of ..damn dude! a mailing list is nothing more than a database that spools to a print server, I hope to hell these idiots someday find themselves
them sound like we're being overrun by M$ Trolls.!!
My son is a computer science major in a very very expensive
engineering college and that school runs on Solaris
servers and linux clients. People have been so brainwashed into name specific applications they are lost without their Word,Excel, and Powerpoint ??
Give me a break, If a college student can use gnumeric they can damn sure use Excel..Mailing list
in a world without their Word, Excel, and Powerpoint....I don't remember the world before Microsoft as being incapable of doing a mailing list...
what an idiot....LOL
Does the Slashdot community have any points that I can give my grandfather to present to the Board next month?
Yes. Tell him to be prepared to explain why it's not blackmail and how they'll be protected from possible legal ramifications.
Then tell him to further be prepared to demonstrate the figures proving the small (but vocal and passionate) upswing from Linux fanatics will outweigh the downswing from those realists who know there's a darned good chance they'll have to know some MS software in the course of their career.
I didn't learn all of my computer skills on a single platform. That's because in the 80's there were dozens of computer platforms and OSs.. and none of them particuarly ruled over the others. Thus I learned what I could with whatever platform I could get my hands on (Apple, Atari, Commodore, IBM, TI, etc.) By applying my computer knowledge across different platforms I was able not only able to better grasp basic computing concepts but it taught me to be platform independece.
I'm sure this description fits many Slashdot readers.
Today's students are different. They typically have only one computing platform to learn on... usually Windows. What this type of learning environment produces are people who only know how to use a single platform or a single appication. Set them in front of a Mac or Linux or anything else and they freeze up and instantly plead ignorance becaues things don't work the way they anticipate.
What more schools need to realize is that making a lab all one platform (Wintel or otherwise) only teaches students into believing all computers only work one way. They really need to be taught more broad skills in understanding computers based on how they function across different platforms.. instead of teaching them how to click the Start button.
...a scholarship for students who dual-boot?
I'm determined to reclaim my karma. Now, if I can only find a groundbreaking article and something witty to say....
They'll have to turn it down. There are always going to be some departments that will need to use a Microsoft Product for something. There's no way they'll be able to convert to 100% non-Microsoft. It's an absurd demand. Even going for 90% would be extremely difficult.
The proper answer is, "Thanks, but no."
Because the students can be supplied with the same environment at home as they use in Labs. Visual Studio is nothing much. If a student has a sound knowledge of Java and C++, the interface is not a problem to learn is it?. (What's a semi-OO pig like VB doing anywhere?).
Java is still more useful in the 'Real World' than C#.
I haven't been in touch with the industry for a while, but I assume that Macs continue to be the preferred tool for design departments.
Take the money and strike a blow for hoensty and fair business practice -- becasue ethincs is an important part of an education too.
The poster didnt mention anything about how many arts/science students there are in the college, which could influence the decision considerably. Put simply, science based students would be expected to cope with more technical systems (especially CS students), whereas arts students may not be expected to have/gain any more knowledge other than is required to type up documents in a word processor.
:P and no I'm not serious there).
Okay, I admit its not that simple, but if the college leant more towards the science side, then there is a better case for switching, based only on the 'linux is less user friendly' argument.
The counter argument to that is however, that students who only want to type documents would be perfectly served well by a KDE/GNOME based desktop and one of the myriad of office suites that are usable out there. It doenst have to be word and excel.
Some other posts I've seen mentioned the lack of CS students learning Visual studio etc. but even in departments with windows/linux combined, visual studio isnt always taught - e.g. I'm currently half way through my 2nd year of a CS degree and havent ever been exposed to any of the visual studio tools (as part of the course at least), although I'm sure there are options in the third year that involve it.
The point being that when being taught a language, say C++, it is much more instructive to learn the basics, and the standard form of the language, and then learn the Microsoft API's later if neccesary.
If taught about say.. function callbacks in general, that can be applied to many situations, including microsoft api's (disclaimer, I dont know visual C++/Windows API so I could be mistaken here). Whereas learning that you need to do CreateWindowEx(blah) or whatever to create a window is extremely limited in scope, and I dont believe that limiting the system to linux would hinder students learning if they are taught general, transferrable (argh I hate that word.. just cant think of anything better) skills.
Of course, the same argument could be made in favour of a complete windows system, and on that basis alone, the argument would be valid. However, another factor that is extremely important is that most students who have had any exposure to computers at all at least have some familiarity with windows based systems, and while it is nice to have familiar systems to work with, the students wont be exposed to anything new. Remember here that the students who only want to use office based tools will have a mostly familiar interface to work with (Stick a label on the bottom left of the screen saying start and they wont know the difference
In the end though it really does come down to money, because all of the advantages to using linux mentioned (except money/moral issues) are still present if both systems are used, while all the disadvantages of going linux only are solved by having dual systems. Now moral issues (well religious wars really) are the province of slashdot and linux evangelists (of which I am one), and probably not likely to be a convincing argument for a university board. Which leaves money, and as has already been mentioned, this is likely to fall the wrong way for the linux-only solution.
Hell, I went to a mostly M$ endowed CS program (at the time), and when I have to code against the win32api, or MFC, I spend about that amount of time in the books too.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I don't think they should do it. Any donation that sacrifices choice is best left on the table, regardless of where it comes from. The educational system should be based on preparing the students to think more betterer, not advancing OS holy wars.
Having said that, they're nuts if they *aren't* teaching Linux because it's real software, it's free and the students have access to the source code. What other reason do you need? I mean, you have to worry about plagiarism in OS design classes, but that's been not going to go away by only teaching Microsoft, either.
Now, having said that, it bothers me that Universities teach Microsoft software at all. I mean, it isn't that freaking hard, people: you have help files, MSTechNet and Google -- what the hell else do you need?! You will spend the rest of your lives getting lost in Microsoft's support center, so why not use the university time you've got to take something that's going to change you as a person, and **WON'T** be obsolete in three years - something like math or philosophy, or literature?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
The protection against BSA audits is a HUGE benefit. Schools are regularly targeted (often for good reason) for audits.
The cost in person-hours for school staff is very high, as is the tension created by the whole event. I daresay it's more stress than an IRS audit.
Of course, since most schools (and companies for that matter) haven't begun with a good license management system, they have no idea where their licenses are for most of their installed software.
In the future of course, we're all learning to be vigilant with our license tracking, but big companies and institutions have a much harder climb to get there. Meanwhile they get slammed periodically at a big cost.
Of course, if all of your software is open source, and you pay even modest attention to the licenses of the apps, you can rest very easy.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I believe a college, especially a Computer Science department, should mimic what is in the real world.
And in the real world, Microsoft dominates the desktop, while Unix dominates the high end server market. Have the servers all running Linux, and have the desktops running a dual boot Linux/Windows installation.
Yep, they do. I'm still working and being paid very well and I've never touched, learned, or cared to touch or learn VB. Most employers don't care what language you use; so long as the project meets requirements when finished.
Unfortunately it is a bad idea. Several good points have already been raised and a couple bears repeating.
:-)
1. Cost for the switchover, retraining of the instructors, cis administrators, secretaries, etc.
2. Currently the workplace relies on Microsoft. Graduates will have to be retrain thus putting them at a disadvantage.
My suggestion is for the money to be donated towards building a computer lab that is strictly non-microsoft in addition to the microsoft systems. This will give the students training with best of both worlds.
OR the money can be donated to me and I promise never to use anything microsoft
Why is this not anticompetitive?
MIT is pretty much a Windows-free campus; specifically, all public computers run Athena, which is an inhouse environment for Solaris, Linux, and other flavors of Linux.
The money isn't a big thing, as you mention, and to be honest, overall, the students aren't all going to be future programmers or things like that. Unless your grandfather wants a new direction for the school as a specialty programmers/engineers training center, it might be a good idea to talk to the IT and curriculum support departments. They're the ones who are going to have to deal with the 3000 or so students who can't make the leap.
I'm at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and we run FreeBSD on PCs. There are also a few Windows machines but they're unusable because of exterior attacks. (we have important scientific data on our hard drives).
So for us, using Windows is suicidal. In the case of an undergraduate-only college, of course, this problem does not exist, but security remains an important concern. In my opinion, this should be taken into account when computing the TCO of Windows.
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
If a religious group showed up and said that they would donate 10 million if every student would be forced to write "by the grace of god(/allah/vishnu/whatever)I write this paper on (whatever)" How would you feel then? If they want to donate the money and earmark it for something specific, FINE, but this ammounts to bribery and is NOT for the betterment of the school, which HAS to be the first priority.
FLAME AWAY, you know I'm right.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
If I were a board member I wouldn't want any part of such an arrangement. And if I were an IT Admin or an instructor in such an institution I'd be outraged that such a thing would even be considered.
Decisions about what software are used in teaching and administrative tasks should be left to the people who actually use the software. Making sweeping decisions based on the whims of a wealthy patron is not in the best interests of any institution.
I think it'd be great for college students to use computers apart from Microsoft, but I'm told that the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students.
What benefit to students is that, exactly?There's nothing to prevent the college from using open source or non-MS products wherever they want to, if they think it would benefit the students or the instutition as a whole.
BSA audits will happen no matter what..Second College is supposed to broaden your horizons. That's why all of us CS geeks had to take Humanities and such for our degrees. Limiting the students becaus eof some aholes bias is ridiculous. It also harms the students, because hands on experience with all the different flavors is what will best prepare the students. Their job may be in a unix, linux, microsoft, or mac(OK probably not MAC) environment. They need to atleast be familiar with all of these and the tools to work in each of these.
It seems strange to me to completly remove all MS software from campus, because it is prevelent in the rest of the world, and students will most likely need to understand how to use it once they leave school.
On the same token, it seems like an excelent idea to bring in other platforms, truly teaching students about the varity of computing.
So, a grant that is supposed to be used for non-MS products seems like a great way to help students find out about alternative computing platforms, but to create an MS free zone I think would do the students an injustice.
i reckon, and this is based that im facing the same juncture when dealing with my final repport for CS, that the best way to sway is to convince them that having programs without source code is like having text books without text.
***i watched you change into a fly***
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Linux free, M$ expensiveblah blah blah. But it's not true.
First, what critical systems run under Windows? I work at a small liberal arts college. Our student registration and billing systems are Windows. There are no Unix versions of the software we use. Comparable Unix products cost, quite literally, millions of dollars. (Price Banner recently? Our IT director did: it's buy Banner or renovate the library.)
Oh, did I mention that we'd lose all the extensive customizations, support documentation and the like we've made to those products? Let's redo a few man-years of effort.
Then there's all the costs to switch the Windows software over to Unix. What various professors use *isn't* free. Rebuying SPSS alone would run a small fortune. Forget all the econometrics programs the Econ folks have, the CAD programs, the quantum chemistry codes...
Of course, some software simply isn't available, period. I'd lose Chime, a great plug-in that I can do all sorts of neat chemistry tricks with. There is no comparable Unix program.
Next, you've probably got close to 1000 computer using staff and faculty on that campus. How much will it cost to retrain all of them? Oh, and finding secretaries and office workers that know StarOffice is damn hard. We can hire MS Office-knowing temps cheap.
At least double the size of the Help Desk, to handle the increased volume of calls. You're going to need a full-time person just to handle the inevitable complaints about losing formatting on all of those Word documents the profs get mailed.
Now, how many of your current IT staff can handle the changes to Linux? We've got some good network admins, server gurus and programmers here, but they're Windows folks. Do you fire those staff or switch them to Unix, where their 10+ years of experience is suddenly null?
It's not enough money. Not even close.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Many of the comments claim that is important for students to learn to use microsoft products.
Read the restrictions on the donation again. There is no restriction on students buying, using, or learning microsoft products. The restriction is on the University buying microsoft products.
Does the student really care what operating system the campus servers use? Do they really need IIS to serve the campus web pages?
This donation could save the University millions in the long run by helping it to get away from cost of Microsoft licenses. My university is considering moving away from Microsoft, and $2.4 million might be just enough to tip the balance. Tell your grandfather to give his donor my address if his university doesn't want the money.
Or he could go the way of Venezuela and other countries, and declare that instead of saying "no Microsoft" just say "no closed source software". Then Microsoft is free to bring an open source offering to the university, nobody is being 'locked out', and nobody can complain about unfairness.
MORTAR COMBAT!
There is bigger catch-22 issues with linux right now that makes windows well worth the 500 bucks, fuck...
It didn't say they had to throw the current stuff away or migrate immediately. Just to not renew contracts or buy new. This isn't so hard to do.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
an alumnus has agreed to donate $2.4 million initially (and up to $800,000 each succeeding year for 10 years)a linux
a linux millionaire...
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.
Open office has a presentation module.
Existing PC's wouldn't have to be converted right away. Still, you'd want to migrate to Linux to get experience with the alternatives. If you have tons of Word documents, you should start exporting them to RTF, and experimenting with using them on new software right away. You DO run into issues.
Let's say that you use the $800K/year for new hardware, and hardware is turned over every 3 years. That gives you $2.4 million for your total hardware budget. For 7000 students, that's $342 per student. That's a pretty cheap system for each student. If you go with 4 years for hardware turnover (average) you get a much easier $457 per student. For that, you can get useable Linux systems from Walmart.
You might want to allocate some money to a few higher end systems. These would be put together from parts - which would save some money, get you exactly what you want, and still avoid the MS tax.
One outcome of this experiment would be a working cross platform word processing file format. That, IMO, would be worth the effort.
The price point might make you rethink individual systems. If they all have a network card, they don't all have to have CD drives or CD burners. These can be shared. A few might have scanners. They could all be used to back up each other's data. The network is the machine. This idea may make it hard to purchase Walmart systems, though.
-- Stephen.
Now there's someone who owns a pile of microsoft stock (as is also likely to be the cace for the college's decision makers).
Most of those students are likely to already know all the microsoft crap they're likely to need professionally. Which means Word and Outlook. Learing PeePee is trivial if you know word. Learning ow to click the buttons in Excel is equally trivial. (Learning to build a spreadsheet without errors is not trivial, but is never covered.)
Have them buy Macs! :-)
On the face of it, this proposal is unfair. If MS were to make such an offer with the condition that the university could only use MS products, people would be screaming bloody murder.
Here is a conter-proposal I'd make. The board should propose that the money be spent to offer CS classes in programming using non-MS operating systems. Use the money to hire faculty, buy hardware and software, and pay other bils associated with this project. Done correctly, this could really enhance the school's CS program. This, IMHO, would be much more useful than merely making the kinds of demands this donor is making.
set up two desktop machines, one running the Windows version of your choice, and the other running the Linux distro of your choice. Perform the following tasks on each:
...
(1) check email
(2) browse the web
(3) type a paper and print it
(4) (Windows only) reboot frozen machine
(5) (Windows only) recover corrupt registry file
MORTAR COMBAT!
Well, since you don't have to ditch your existing Windows OS desktop licenses, you could phase in to a Linux desktop. What is does specify is you don't buy or renew licenses from Microsoft. So if you subscribe yearly for server licenses, you will have to switch to Samba or something else like it immediately. Having the option to phase into a Linux desktop using OpenOffice as your office suite, I don't see any reason why you could not migrate everything at a substantial cost savings. With $800,000 a year, you will be able to afford 10 top notch Unix guys to help with the transition.
First figure out everything your school does with computers. Then see if you can meet those same objectives with a non-MS (Linux, BSD, and Mac) solution.
Then figure out the "types" of computers you will have. Faculty desktops, Internet kiosks etc. Can you make a couple of standard "images" and roll them out to those "types" of computers? Probably, and it will be fairly cheap to do.
I graduated from Michigan State in 95 and there was a petition going around complaining that MS and the Windows environment was not taught at the school. We studied on Sparc systems running Unix. But the problem is that many students found it hard to find a job coming out of college with no Windows experience.
You say "The best education these students could receive is a broad one."
I agree. And in essentially all colleges and universities the students do not get a broad exposure to computing. They see microsoft products and only microsoft products.
After all, most of them already have microsoft based machines - from the OS through the browser through the "office" aps - on their own personal machines.
"No Bias." in this case is a very effective way to ensure that only Microsoft products will be seen.
And they'll fight like hell to resist learning anything else. After all they already know that the only computing they need to know is Microsoft based.
And all but a few professors will go along with them, having achieved their PhD's and being now determined not to learn anything they don't have to.
I have proposed more than once, to people in more than one college/university that a computer literacy program needs to include Linux and MacOS and MS stuff. I've been told uniformly that thats impossible - that the only thing anyone wants to teach/buy/learn is MS.
In my opinion the only way to get students to learn another system is to push them into doing it and this gift is exactly the right way to do that. It will almost certainly be refused - a combination of small minded faculty types, MS pressure and students whining "I want my Outlook" will kill it.
I'm sure this will get lost in the din, but my opinion is that your grandfather should try to convince the donor to soften his conditions to some thing like "we won't spend any of the money FROM THIS DONATION on MS" rather than "we won't buy ANYTHING MS".
It's almost impossible to completely wean an entire community of that size off of MS products - I've been working at a University and know that there are a lot of people who can't send email if the "send" button moves, and the necessary training for everyone who isn't able to adapt is prohibitively expensive.
Most importantly, it's liable to drive away potential students, which is a greater revenue hit than losing a donation. The donor clearly isn't aware of this problem.
But they can still spend the new money to decrease their reliance on MS, and show their students the alternatives and why they're better. Both the college and open-source software can still get whatever publicity they hoped for. Besides, non-MS solutions always look best when compared to MS.
You haven't made the case that simply swapping out Microsoft software for something else is going to benefit students. Ideology aside, it is a very hard case to make. Except for computer science students ( who should be, and almost certainly already are, exposed to a variety of vendors and software), how would using, say, Linux instead of Windows benefit all students any more than swapping out Buicks for Fords?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Pros:
1) The university gets millions of dollars from an unnamed donor. A lot of the rougher parts of the transition could be smoothed over by this money. The other points will focus on the transition itself.
2) The university saves a bundle on licensing fees. This may be especially important since Microsoft is trying to move towards a subscription model.
3) While open source solutions aren't drop-in replacements for Microsoft products, the end user apps are similar enough to minimize the need for retraining. If someone knows their way around a Windows desktop, Gnome and KDE are pretty easy to grasp. The same goes for Office vs. OpenOffice and IE vs. Mozilla. With power users, its sometimes trickier, since they may have come to rely on certain obscure features.
4) With OSS, you don't need to rely on Microsoft for technical support. The fact is, Microsoft is the only company capable of adding features and fixing bugs in Microsoft products. So if you have a problem with those products, and MS isn't interested in fixing them, you're out of luck. Open source is more flexible in this regard.
5) A better CS program. If we assume that dropping MS will substantially increase the use of open source software, then it's very likely that CS students will have reasons to explore the code of the products they use every day. So they're being exposed to non-trivial implementations of structures, algorithms, software design decisions, and everything else that comes along with it.
I realize that Microsoft's "Shared Source Initiative" also allows some level of access to the code. But the barriers are much higher (NDAs), and the rewards are much lower (can't recompile, bugfix, or experiment).
Cons:
1) Ten years is a long time. You don't know what new products and services Microsoft will be coming out with over that time, or how useful they might be to the campus. Think about how the computing world has changed since 1993, and ask if the school really should be making such long term decisions about their IT infrastructure.
2) You lose the option to buy Microsoft products. By itself, this fact is too obvious to mention. But what are the ramifications?
3) You lose compatability with important Windows-only software (like certain CAD products). The university may be able to hobble along with the licenses they already own, but that's going to be more and more difficult.
4) People don't like change. Such a transition could make for an ugly political brawl.
[note: Five pros, four cons! Obviously, this means they should take it.]
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Let Microsoft know about the 800k offer to ditch Microsoft, and see how much they are willing to donate to keep the school!!... theres no reason you can't try to make things a little more interesting
The problem with this thinking, no matter how "pro-Slashdot" it might be, is that many companies require Microsoft products for day-to-day operations, and students could be at a huge disadvantage when trying to find job placement.
Like it or not, I wouldn't have a job at the company at which I am VERY happily employed if I didn't have experience with Microsoft products.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
tell your grandfather to go to Microsoft and see if they can beat the other guy's donation offer if the school uses nothing from Microsoft competition.
Let's get all the schools to take their software from the highest donator.
How about OSX for all? What makes Linux's UNIX better than the BSD that is in OSX?
Was the estimate based on switching to Linux, Mac, or other options?
Did it take in account software utilities like MS Office?
is gotta be a college with a lot of pretty girls =)
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
If the university system is based on OSS then the students will be free to use whatever they like to connect to it. IE has no problems connecting to Apache, OE has no problems connecting to a *nix mail server.
If the college systems are based on MS software on the other hand... connecting to an Exchange or Notes server pretty much requires Windows if the university want to use all of the 'advanced' functions that are available to anyone in something like Horde.
As far as programming goes, again, work done in Ansi C or Java (or even C++) will be easily portable to Windows to run at home. Stuff done in Visual Basic or even C# is _not_ easily portable.
Students can log into the university boxes with PuTTy/Exeed if they like, can you log into a Windows terminal server box (easily/free/at all) from Linux? Yeah, right.
Universites should pick the most stards compliant, open systems they can (so, Linux, BSD, something else) when setting p their network so they can retain access for all, no matter what their client wants to learn. The £2.4 million will just help them get there faster in this case.
Beep beep.
what is the current entrenchment of MS?
For all I know, it could be the only thing it teaches, and this donor is trying to combat that.
Doesn't the stipulation only apply to the money the donor is giving?
Personally, I don't think in university should teach any proprietary language, or teach any IDE.
I see far too many people that came out of college in the last few years that don't understand what goes into compiling, how a compiler interpets there source code, or understand the pros and cons of different methodologies.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually, I applaud any developer that doesn't use VB :-)
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
It seems that for the most part only computer science (and administrative software) has been dicussed here.
While not at all exclusive to the biological sciences, analytical equipment which is run in conjunction with desktop computers often only has software available for Windows operating systems.
Many imaging systems for microscopes, ELISA plate readers, bioreactors, spectrophotometers and many others pieces of equipment, use proprietary software and do not have any non-windows software available.
2.4 million would not go very far in replacing this type of equipment as new computers (and therefore software licenses) would be purchased, assuming alternatives were available.
If entirely new equipment was required to be purchased, the time required to update and rewrite the research protocols and validate the equipment would also have to be considered.
Why limit your choices if you don't have to?
Kevin.
It's called an MSCE. If you're worried about not enough people are being prepared for their "Microsoft Future" in college, you obviously have no idea what college is about. It's a lot more than just a MicroSerf Trade-Skool.
Besides, have the kids learn MacOSX and Linux and then they will be prepared for what Windows will be trying to ape by the time they finally graduate.
What the hell kind of school is that?
Not one that I would send my kid to.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
First of all, there will be the cost savings of not having to license an anti-virus suite for your email server.
Next, there is the per-seat licensing issue that will simply go away. No more $35,000 (or so) for licensing 1000 connections into an Exchange server.
Next, if you want to implement a decent campus-wide kiosk type Internet access system, there are plenty of NCD type terminals ($30.00 or so on ebay in quantity) that work remotely with XFree86. Our friends at the K-12 Linux Terminal Server Project can probably offer some advice on how to set this sort of system up.
If you need to maintain some sort of Windows compatibility (there will probably be 1 or 2 systems that must run Windows only software), our friends at the Samba Project offer an excellent Windows Networking compatibility layer.
You can also emphasize that without Windows, your computer investment won't become obsolete in 2 years.
I could probably come up with hundreds of other ideas, but this should help get things rolling.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
A number of years ago, I needed to set up a computational lab with no budget for software, even though we had machines. We had no choice but to go with a Linux OS. Although a few people groaned and complained at first, after a while, it all worked quite well. Just recently though a story started circulating that the State (I work at a State University) was contemplating going into a 'Microsoft only' deal. Nobody knows if this story is true, but the gossip around the proverbial techie water fountain now concerns how to keep our linux boxes hidden. FWIW, it seems to me that any OS monoculture is bad -- evolution teaches us that diversity produces advantages.
You know, it is REALLY tiring to constantly hear everyone bitching about Microsoft. They aren't perfect, but they certainly aren't the devil either.
There seems to be something inherently wrong with the *nix crowd: 20 years ago, they bitched about Digital and IBM, now they bitch about Microsoft, for the same reason - they're mad that the world doesn't think the same way they do, and idolize their favorite operating system the way that they do.
This is a religous argument at best, and I suspect the Torquemada and his ilk had similar views in their time.
Understand this: Microsoft has the dominant operating system and office suite because there is nothing better. In this case, 'better' is used in the economic sense - something better (by some measure, which isn't alway consistent) *always* replaces inferior products. Therefore, let *nix and everything else compete on their merits, not on the rhetoric. All you *nix zealots sound like the Christian missionaries trying to convert the heathens, and if they had to kill the heathen to convert them, then so be it.
I didn't learn MS programming when I was in school either, but I certainly used Windows and MS Word for any papers I had to write. I logged onto Windows to do web surfing to research stuff too.
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Even though I am certainly a supporter of the open source movement, I would advise your grandfather not to take the money, simply because there is too much risk limiting the university in such a way.
What if the U wanted to offer an engineering course, for example, that used a program that only ran on windows? What if there was productivity desktop software for the administration that only worked on Windows?
It would be stupid for a university to *require* itself to only use Microsoft products. There is just too great a risk that they would find they really need MS for something and they find themselves hamstrung. I would push to have the donation changed to say something like all computer labs must use Linux on the desktop or something like that targeting specific areas rather than the whole university which is a rediculous commitment to make.
This is a perfectly justifiable position, even in a University setting. The reason is that Microsoft intentional designs their product to close out choice as much as possible. It is a trap. It is extremely hard to get out of.
One doesn't limit the freedom to choose by intentionally excluding some choices as long as the excluded items are excluded because they themselves limit freedom. For example, one isn't somehow limited because they a priori choose not to try nicotine or heroin because those products are designed to remove choice. One isn't somehow limited because they a priori select not to ever spend time in prison because that removes freedom. Consequently, because Microsoft has intentionally and deliberately designed their product such that the choice to use other products will be subsequently limited, then any institution has a right, or maybe even a responsibility, to ban Microsoft products.
As soon as they demonstrate that that is not what they are doing they will be welcome back. Recent actions regarding web browsers, media players, DRM, etc. demonstrate that Microsoft must be banned from Universities to preserve choice and freedom there.
BTW, this is not the same as the typical University anti-choice IT decision to go all Microsoft (or Unix or Mac in some fantastical world). Because in this instance all the other current, and future, choices are still available.
I'm all for choosing something else over Microsoft, but its gotta be a choice. To say "You must use X" is just as bad whether or not X is "microsoft".
I say go back to the benefactors and ask them to reconsider. Perhaps they could fund a student-access lab stocked with non-MS computers. Get them involved in the setup, maintenance of the lab(s).
Maybe it would be better spent just donating the money to departments who promise to not require homework be done in microsoft format only.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
this annonymous funder wants your g'pa to use all non-microsoft products? does this include Macs? or is this a designed loophole to suggest that OSS is the perogative but still get by with these silly pieces of fruit? yea i know i got called a troll the last time i made fun of macs but still... totally worth it.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
I would be more apt to sympathize with the strings attached to this donation if it weren't so clearly going to dictate the educational doctrine of my school.
Am I missing the obvious?
Cheers,
-- RLJ
What's this talk about a school that has alumnus donating big money to boycott Microsoft? I think this is a fake submission. I can't think of any good reason why anyone would donate such large sums of cash to make sure a school boycotts Microsoft. I mean really, this is not even an issue. There clearly is no need to boycott Microsoft from a school's point of view. Furthermore, what kind of 7000 student school would have students who understood how to use Linux and/or macs. And in case you were wondering, it's bologna sandwich or Brittney Spears.
void
It just so happens I'm planning on setting up a non-MS campus of my own called "University of Me". I'm looking for donations to help out.
No sig for you!!
This may be a stupid question, since it's the obvious one, but I didn't see it anywhere else...
Nothing in the post seemed to indicate that the money had to be used to replace anything that the university already has, nor that taking the money means that they must never use MS products again. Why not use that money to fund a project that works with and enhances what the university already has?
Presumably the university already has an IT budget and staff -- why isn't this $2.4MM + $800k/yr free money? Take the money and hire a few good people at first, in addition to the staff you've already got, and have those people work on an X-year plan for introducing OSS (or just non-MS) software in the places that it makes sense.
Don't get rid of all your Windows machines -- not immediately, and likely not ever -- but view that money as an incredible gift: the university has been given the opportunity to explore a large-scale transition to OSS, without having to take money away from what they're already doing.
Damn, wish my projects worked that way... :)
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
This question cannot be decided without taking into account the strategy of Microsoft.
2005 : MS releases Longhorn, which, according to MS, will require 1TB harddrive to run properly.
It will also come with the Palladium technology - which is ethically inacceptable, unless you're really, really, really patriotic.
It will be bitterly ironic to use such a machine to teach philosophy/ethics. Good luck to your grandfather.
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
Here at KSU we take a hybrid approach to public labs. Probably because of some kind donations by Sun Microsystems. I'd say its about half MS and half miscellaneous (Solaris, Debian, minx..) on the desktops, but most if not all of our mainframes and servers are UNIX based.
Its important to note that the solaris labs are treated like lepper colonies. Sure its nice for me when I need to do something real quick because I know where theres at least 12 open computers guarenteed, but that goes out the window if I need to print, watch a tegrity lecture (online lecture recording and viewing system that uses Java + MS extensions for video) or do something in Rose. Honestly, I don't blame them. The Sun workstations are pretty damn old SPARC 5's. Plus they don't run trillian and solitaire (little do the grad students know/care that gaim is installed on the central server).
But in general I think the mix approach is best, allthough if they're not gonna make MINIX boostrap then they outta trash it and put in something usable. A lot of the windows boxes are just faster, and we have a nice win32 based X windows site liscence. You can learn about UNIX without having a UNIX desktop, believe it or not.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Now they get a homogenous Linux setup? Weren't we just yesterday going on about how homogeny is BAD. Unless it's Linux homogeny I guess.
Is it so inconceivable that anyone would *want* to use any MS product on their own? Do you truly believe that every person on theplanet is useing MS software because they have a gun to their head?
Tell your grandpa to take a hike. He and his thugs will probably have better luck donating to the KKK to get rid of blacks in schools or somthing.
IMHO you titled your response very appropriately. It deserves to be fertilizer.
Linux works fine for most desktop users. There are opensource applications that can do most anything a student needs to do.
A great benefit of using open source software in a university environment is that it is very likely that the students will fix existing applications and code new ones if they don't like what is available. Even if you are correct that the available applications are not sufficient, I doubt that it would take long for that to change.
Also consider that a student would be free to own a Microsoft operating system and keep it installed on thier personal machine if they wish.
I think that there may be short term inconveniences but that in the long run the students would benefit, the university would benefit and the computing world in general would benefit.
I should know. I am using Linux (gentoo) on my desktop and have been running some form of linux on my desktop for 3 years. I have also developed a production open source web infrastructure. I mean end to end, from the routers to the application servers to the database servers etc... It blows away the commercial alternatives in terms of function and cost less that 25% of the cost of a commercial alternative to implement. Not to mention that I can, if necesary, run the site for nearly no cost now that the core development is complete, since it it so stable and there are no yearly license fees. I just buy bandwidth and keep my boxes running. The ongoing maint/licensing costs of a commercial solution can be quite daunting.
If students learned to do what I have done it will benefit both them and thier future employers, as well as the university.
In my school, we run only *nix. There are a lot of benevole, voluntary students helping the other ones to start with these systems, and that works pretty nice.
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
Open source is about the freedom to choose what software you want to run.
Entering into an agreement to specifically exclude MS software is inherently anti-choice.
You can't be pro-open source and anti-choice at the same time.
Until we in the open source commnuity make the total cost of ownership of open source comparable to commerical products we have no real chance.
Secondly, the traditional Unix hack-er type installation, setup, configuration, and operation of many open source software packages is a serious roadblock to adoption.
Third, usability of many open source software packages precludes them from being used by your average corporate user, average college student, your mom, your dad...
Try explaining to someone non-geeky how to go from a new machine to one running only linux including basic multimedia, dialup/broadband net access, and email setup.
I work at a college with an enrollment of about half of the enrollment of that university My job is to install the software for all the PC's on the network. While the money offered here is good (assuming it's not the sole source of funding), The students needs need to come first. At the moment most textbooks that ship CD's are only in win32 format. The professors demand that I install *HORRIBLE* vertical market software. One example, The software for the CLEP program, requires a win32 based workstation and server. As a Novell & Linux shop we groaned as we installed a Win2K Server. From what I understand there is only one vendor making CLEP software and due to the security the perceive they need over the tests. It is written in Java, but has proprietary win32 dependacies. They don't want to hear that I want a Non-Microsoft version. They told me that.
Another issue that College/Universities have to deal with is Faculty backlash. While students may complain, the voices are not heard nearly like those of the Professors. Sometimes Teachers are the worst students. Many resist the change as long as possible. When we setup classes for them to learn something new, they often don't sign up, or do not attend.
The standards in the business world are ms office and their os systems. If the students don't use them at all they will be very unprepared for the great wide world. It has to be one of the worst ideas I've ever seen.
This is a very welcome change. I don't know about other Colleges, but mine is "in bed" with Microsoft. Wherever you go on campus, you see Microsoft ads for products with educational discounts. Hopefully more Colleges will follow suit.
--- WAL
An eye for an eye.
Microsoft has long been guilty of many crimes, and the government even now continues to "underpunish" them. Anything that harms of hinders them, through whatever channels or measures, I've no qualms with. As far as I'm concerned, that's called punishment.
Considering cost without considering the benefits doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. It's the relationship between the two that are what the decision should be made on. Furthermore, what is the benefit to students by making the entire college anti-microsoft? It would be somewhat silly to graduate from a college and not have any experience with MS systems and software, particularly since there's a ~90% (iirc) chance that they'll be using MS stuff when they graduate. I'm all for teaching unix/bsd/linux at the undergraduate level (I'm fighting that battle in my own way at my school, in fact) and certainly for avoiding a reliance on Windows, but forcing an entire institution (if there are 7,000 students, then probably in the ballpark of 2,000 staff+instructors+administrators) to forego MS products entirely would not necesarily keep costs down, much less help productivity. I think the ideal environment would be one that has roughly equal access to MS, Mac, and various *nix/bsd flavors as well as the software that is made for them. I would be spending most of my time in the *nix/bsd environment (as I already do), but one should not be mutually exclusive of the other.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
I won't use any M$ software or anything related to it for the rest of my life if your Grandfather would like to donate an initial $2.4M and up to $800k for up to 10 years therafter to my private bank account. How's THAT for a deal!!
"the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students"
Isn't cost a huge consideration for most students?
Ever wonder why some universities have money to build new sports stadiums and swimming pools, but no money to fix a broken dining hall? Or why a liberal-arts school might have a brand-new Science building while the library is about to crumble?
One reason is that too many donors are only willing to give money with strings attached. You want to build a Science building, so you ask the Keck or Broad foundation to give you money. No problem. You need to raise an extra 100K here, another 100K there for general maintenance and repair, and nobody wants to give.
If you're in the position to donate a significant amount of money to a university, please consider giving it with no strings attached. I understand that sometimes it's nice to have your name on a building, but don't forget about all of the programs that get neglected because all of the school's money is already earmarked for other projects.
Few minor differences exists though (no poll(), limit on number of selectors(), AF_INET instead of PF_INET, etc), but these do not prevent many people (including myself) from writing clean networking code, which is portable between *nix/win32.
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In a top level post, because all the people who have said this are being ranked so low, they might not be heard.
What the story says is that they would be required to not purchase any NEW Microsoft products. Nothing in the story indicates that the campus would need to eradicate all traces of Microsoft from their network!!
IANAL... But I play one on
The trouble with M$'s dominance is that too many people are unable to make choices about the software they use. In many cases, they are required by their employer or university to use Windows, Office, Explorer or whatever, whether they want to or not. Many others simply never get the opportunity to learn or use anything else; some people never find out in the first place that are other OS's besides Windows, other office suites besides Office, other browers besides Explorer. This is bad enough in the world of business and personal computer use; it is unconscionable when it happens in universities and schools, where learning and diversity are what it's all about.
That is the problem that your grandfather and his potential donor need to solve. But by forbidding M$ altogether, the university is deprived of choices, so the solution is not much better than the problem. Hate to say it, because I loathe M$ and everything about it from the very depths of my soul. But that's all the more reason not to want to be similar to Bill Gates and his gangsters.
Tell your grandfather to make this suggestion to the donor: The money that the donor puts up will be used to ensure that the university will always have a choice about the software used there. If someone wants to use non-M$ software, they can use the funds to make the purchases, migrate their systems, re-train the staff, whatever they need to do. But if, after evaluating all possibilities, M$ seems to be the best way to go, then they can use it for that as well. Maybe they just need some Windows licenses, because the undergrads will need to know how to use it and develop for it when they graduate. Surely that's reasonable enough. Just as long as the university doesn't have to go with M$ because they're locked in somehow. That would be a very kind gift, and everyone at the university will be grateful for it.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Doesn't sound like the worst thing that could happen.
I've read many statements saying that students should be prepared for the real world, and for using Microsoft products. I've also seen discussion that CS students should be tought concepts and not just languages and libraries.
Now, put these two ideas together. Using OpenOffice is very similar to using Microsoft Office. A student who graduates knowing how to use either one should be able to quickly learn the differences between them and master the alternative once they are in the work place. It is not only CS students that should be tought concepts and not just specifics.
The other thing, that many have pointed out is that the change need not be immediate. Perhaps a frank discussion with the man donating the money could point out to him that for certain applications, it isn't possible to switch over to non-Microsoft programs. Perhaps until other alternatives become a feasible option (as determined, say, by the admins and perhaps *gritting teeth* a board as designated by the school administration), Microsoft products could be purchased for this usage.
Personally, I'd say that much of this depends on the composition of the school, and the type of school. Many previous posts have simply ASSUMED that the school is only a CS school, or ASSUMED that the school isn't... I think one person even kindly ASSUMED that there's graduate students after it was stated this is an undergraduate only school. Without further details, it is fairly hard to offer any specific insight. Since you have a month, perhaps you could get some more details down, including the financial state of the school, the predominant majors, and other appropriate factors (current budget might be a notable factor), and then bounce if off Slashdotters again.
Anyone giving advice with only partial details is bound to be giving at least partially flawed advice.
"If God's on our side, he'll stop the next war." -- Bob Dylan
Tell your grampa to pass on the details of the offer to Microsoft and see what their counteroffer would be :)
I don't know what subjects are covered at this university, but my guess would be that no matter what the subject, you're going to run into the bane of College/University Sys Admins everywhere: Curriculam software. Whether it is Siesmic Waves, or Nutriquest (Yea, I know that is a dead product from a support view, try telling that to the instructor that has been using it for the last 5 years and won't change because they don't like the new versions), or some DOS app that an English prof had an undergrad write many moons ago, you still have to support them.
Although you can find equivalent software for many things, there will be tons of stuff that you can't replace, and often it is for things that you'd never think of unless your in that field: Business simulation software written in Excel, Tons of accounting programs, Interactive Physics, Chemistry modelers, Reader Rabbit (Yea, for a community college "Intro to Enlgish, what you should have learned in 4th grade" class), etc. I am sure that you can find stuff for History, Peotry, Art, etc. if you were in those fields of study.
The best bet would be to either dual-boot, or have Windows only and Linux only labs, however that sounds like the schools benifactor won't go for that setup, so it sounds like you the school will lose out.
Answering as if this is legitimate, since I really don't know...
It's a tough decision to reject a gift as large as this - especially for a small institution. In this case though, it's probably worth. It would be one thing if he wanted the school to convert certain parts of the institution to using non-MS products, or even to ask them to consider open source alternatives first, but I think it's wrong to rule out a product based on it's brand name. What about comparing cost, benefit, and quality of the products? In some cases this would rule out the Windows products anyway, but I'd bet there'd be some situations where the MS product really is the best or even only option available.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
So, the requirement is that the school not BUY any new Microsoft products. But what about anything that Microsoft gives away to the school for free? See, if MS is desperate enough to indoctrinate the impressionable youth into using their stuff when they graduate, then they'll give stuff to the school as sortof an "investment" in the future.
:)
Yeah, I know. Stupid idea.
What? Take that money right away, and go and get some beers. Hey, open source can be $0 cost. Labor? Student projects, and the current staffs. Also Linux, Open Office, and other tools are already good enough and easy enough for most case (if not all cases).
Then, my school had Mac 99% then, and I had Mac, and I don't work on a mac since I graduate.
Why argue what platform to teach? You should NOT teach to any platform at all.
It should not matter in the first place. School teach you how to learn, and lay the foundation for you to learn, not *give you the fish*.
I wonder if the time these people takes to meet and discuss this problem, can be used to donnate to opensource, or work for beers instead.
Sound not serious? No, it's serious, things are just that fun and great these days.
When I went to school, there was very little Microsoft influence and I did fine too. Of course, the major influence in school at that time was IBM Mainframes, although they had some PDP-11's and VAX's running Unix in the CS department... ;)
word to that, all the nice boxen in the Stewart Center could benefit from a nice Debian install...
I work with students and am one in the evenings, many "students" aren't. They're meat based info regurgitation devices. Move an icon and some become confused, they've been instructed on how to achieve good grades, not necessarily think.
Happy little robots, marching all in line:)
What it might do is introduce them to things that they would orindarily be to lazy (on the basis that it isn't the standard, yet) or pooh their pants to try other wise.
Result? They learn more than if they are only exposed to the Monopolist products and perhaps use only legal software. Ok that last bit about only using legal software is a joke.
Has anyone else ever wondered if shopping people they know to FAST who have illegal software copies would boost the uptake of Free Software or just result in them not waking up dead in a ditch?
Your grandfather should look into MIT's implementation of information systems. There is virtually no reliance on MS yet complete choice for students. The IS implementation at MIT is really a beautiful thing. Too often schools fail to seek best practices before diving into new projects.
I have few years of commercial Windows coding experience and probably half as much of *nix one and I've gotta tell you that different APIs is not the biggest obstacle (and IDEs certainly are even the lesser one). It's more of the general practices issue. On Windows due to its closedness and incomplete documentation, the developer is haunted by a constant feeling of uncertainty. From simple things like an API call suddenly falling on patched version of WinNT to a methods declared as BOOL something() returing anything but 0 and 1.
:)
Dont get me wrong - it's perfectly fine to have bugs in any code, including the OS, but the inability to fully investigate the problem forces developer to stay as independent from the system API as possible and be constantly ready for the weirdest induced f*ckups possible. Sure, there are tons of people who write the code tightly coupled with Windows, but with this often means creating a lot of work for support and deployment departments.
My general impression is that a good (as in "geeky professional") windows developer does not have much trouble moving to the *nix, while the move in the opposite direction is quite likely to be painful. Scroll the this very thread and see what I'm talking about - *nixoids complaining about Windows, and not the other way around
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I find the *nix supporters are the most closed minded people. Cannot digest a comment about a non-*nix product. Won't budge. So closed minded that a non-*nix product being better is not even a possibility. Not even statistically.
And then there's "Real programmers code at the prompt and yada yada yada" and all other such comments.
Actually real programmer write programs so they can run them to get the task done. I would rather click on a button to accomplish what I want. That beats sitting on the prompt typing in multiple greps piped thru multple awk commands piped thru multiple vi commands. Sound idiotic to do it the hard way when computers are here to make things easier.
I don't understand the superiority people feel when they get to type in a 400 character line at the command prompt.
And of course, nobody complains when Gates hands out $100 million for research on AIDs. Or announces $24 billion charitiy funds. Because that's probably the wrong way to improve the world. Real geeks sit at the prompt, bad mouth everything they don't feel is right and occassionally get up to go to the restroom. Yep probably a lot better than something as horrible as being Bill Gates.
I would say it's about time people got off their high horses, but I'm sure most didn't even read this post this far since it didn't start with a pro-*nix opinion.
On a different note, personally I think both Linux and Windows have their strengths and are better in a given context.
Let's not call Solaris an OS. That would be mis-using the word by a huge margin.
...educational institution management software runs against an Oracle backend database on Unix platforms, the frontend is purely Oracle Forms and thus can run on *ANY* Oracle Forms 6.x or later form-running platform, including both Windows and Linux clients, or even a web browser for a client. See SCT's website for more info. This is a serious package, easily capable of handling a university with tens of thousands of students. It ain't cheap either, it is a sophisticated integrated system that needs a knowledgeable dedicated team of experts to run...
Heh, no I didn't use Office. I got along fine with free word-processors (underline, font size, italics and bold are all that's really needed), and last time I checked there were non-Windows web browsers, too!
How did this posting get so top-heavy with pro-Microsoft postings here? Methinks MS-paid writers lay siege! Really, Cliff. I'm neither pro-MS nor pro-Linux. I just think this is an ancient topic covered many times over... check the Slashdot archives or just google "total cost ownership microsoft linux".
feh.
How about, "any computer that handles student records or has permision to access them". Wait, that's about what this is proposing to do. $2.4 million dollars could easily replace all of a 7,000 student University's administrative hardware, not that replacements would be needed where a software swap would do.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
He should hold on to his 2.4 million. Sun stock ain't what it used to be.
"Here's 2.4 million, just don't ever buy Microsoft products."
Scenario two:
"Here's 2.4 million, just make sure you buy only Microsoft products."
In the imaginary university I run in my mind, both offers are equally worthy of being declined. If the offer were ammended to say "Don't buy any MS products with my money", I'd be more than happy to agree. But I'd be loath to let a 2.4mil donation dictate the blanket implementation or removal anything.
Just as my Automotive Mechanics 2 class benifits from the real-world repair job that the school gets paid for us to do, CS departments should have some sort of real-world system to work on.
I'm assuming that there are several servers and several labs. Put groups of students onto different areas and grade on how trouble-free those areas turned out.
They don't have to have root access either, the "paid admin" can keep root and add students to different admin groups as needed. This would keep them from reading/modifying luser email and other BOFH duties that we admins would trust no one else with.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Universities are run by people who know very little about education - they're called Deans.
.sig resource :) )
-Professor Beildelman
(faisal.com good
.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Sorry, but I think that once again zealots are going to spoil the chance for a good outcome.
Any decent sized University will laugh this donor off in a minute. $2.4M is not nearly enough to retrofit an entire campus to another OS. If the donor wants to make sure his donation is only spent on Linux, that's fine, but to completely prevent an entire school from ever buying an MS product is beyond stupid.
Naming a part in a demand is (almost) always wrong and will never be successful. I doubt it's even legal in most cases. The best solution is probably to instead to only provide the money if all software that is installed from now on meets the requirements of the OSI certification, and a careful plan is made for the replacement of the existing software.
This way, even Microsoft would possibly be able to sell software to the University, but hell would likely freeze over before they release anything with a decent OSI license...
Well if the agreement is to not buy anything from MS, and students still want to learn MS... then can't students still learn .NET stuff in GNU/Linux?
Mono has made fair progress and is usable. Wouldn't that be a reasonable solution?
And that's *if* they want MS stuff. But almost everything a student reasonably needs is available for GNU/Linux.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
Without reading the existing comments: I recently completed a degree in the UK and successfully avoided the use of any Microsoft software, so I would say it's possible to populate a University computer suite with alternative products. I do admit to toying with Word when it came to the writing of my final year dissertion but I found it difficult to achieve the results I desired. I therefore decided to take the plunge and to learn TeX (LaTex actually) and immediately preferred it. I should point out that I majored in Software Engineering and my preference for vi and the command line is probally ununsual, but I would suggest that for students of the computer, a non-Microsoft environment is possible. Perhaps your Grandfather and his pals could persuade the benefactor to limit the demands to the computing school.
"By the way, the donor would be better off stating his point in a slightly different way: I make the donation if the University makes a commitment to use free software only. That's good enough. MS can in principle produce free (as in the GPL) software and offer it to the University ;-)"
The donor here might not be a software-libre advocate. Perhaps they just hate MS, and they are fine with the College buying hardware from Sun and Apple, and proprietary software from all over. It might be really hard to run a college with only free software.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Much and all as I'd encourage universities to switch to open source solutions and dump expensive Microsoft ones as quickly and as much as possible, I suspect that there are areas where that just can't happen...yet.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I recently grauated and started working with a firm that uses *only* M$ products. In school and also for personal use, I used Linux. From day one, I found it a little difficult to adjust to M$ Office. The last version of Office I had used was Office 97. I was used to Staroffice/ Corel Wordperfect/ Opeonffice.org for the past few years. Office XP in turn turned out to be a little...different. I would have loved to use the term 'smart' as used by marketing people, but the opposite is true. Anyways, for a 15-minute task, I ended up spending twice the amount of time simply because I had no experience with M$ Office XP before. And people call Office suites as "productivity suites???' Just a small example, and I am sure that many others exist. Also, I am sure this experience is not unique to me. Even today, a lot of job requirements specify that the candidate .... must be familiar with M$ Office.
Just a mixed bag of thoughts...
Other than engineering, computer science, and design students, the majority of students who graduate and will be looking for work will be using Windows at their jobs. Windows is the dominate plaform for offices, and regardless of what kind of degree you have, employeers will expect a certain level of computer skills (on MS platforms). Forcing the school to use only non-MS platforms will hurt the students. Don't get me wrong, I work in a CS dept research lab at my school and we all use Linux for our development (a few OS x macs too), but in general Windows familiarity is what employers are looking for and currently use.
Well, I guess this will probably send you into an apoplectic fit but please understand that that is not my intent.
I would advise this student to recommend to his/her grandfather to actually go one step further and deploy free software for the university but I won't support my reasoning with a "just because" argument.
In an educational environment, students should not only be able to learn from source code, but they should be encouraged to play with it, modify it, and be able to give the product of their endeavors away. That way, their modifications can played with, modified, and shared by others to the benefit of everyone. Everyone has the opportunity to scrutinize, modify, and (most importantly) share with everyone else. I find it hard to imagine an environment more conducive to the sharing of information...aka education.
While I believe that promoting free software primarily on the campus is a worthy goal, I do not think that prohibiting the teaching or usage of alternatives should be prohibited (even if the maker of the software is Microsoft). As others have noted, there is some great software that is not free or even open-source. Much can be learned from this software so it should not be banned completely. But beware the effects of embrace-and-extend business practices.
The primary goal of any learning institution should be to teach its students. The instructors can not do that if their hands are tied by political or philosophical agendas. I recommend encouraging free software for its open nature and the ability to share (especially for the CS majors), but don't lock anything out unilaterally...especially for the faculty. As anathema as it might be to say here on
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
I don't get why you guys get so upset with M$. Many of you at /. are American and I see M$ as a lovely little mini USA. It's big and powerful and monopolistic, likes to flex it's muscles, sometimes uses devious means to achieve it's aims, touts itself as holier than thou and has practices that are going to leave it vulnerable in the future. Don't you see that just as M$ has attained incredible wealth from domineering practices your country is also busy sucking the wealth out of so many other countries.
Think about it.
From simple things like an API call suddenly falling on patched version of WinNT to a methods declared as BOOL something() returing anything but 0 and 1.
In Windows, BOOL (note the uppercase) is 0 or (!0), not 0 or 1. Just a nitpick.
You'd have to be nuts to take this deal. Microsoft is a gigantic corporation with an extremely diverse product portfolio. This deal would commit you for 10 years (an eternity in the software business) to reject them without consideration. Perhaps Microsoft is the only company to have a product with feature X that your students and professors need. Aside from the fact that this is quite likely illegal, to force an entire school to not use some system, which you'd effectively be doing since any software the students are expected to use must be installed on lab computers or otherwise be made available, goes completely against the concept of intellectual freedom that academia holds so dear.
The students don't get any benefit by being forced to go non-microsoft. They get benefit from being shown all the options. They're going to go out into the world in 4 years and damn near every last one of them is gonna need at least some familiarity with MS products. How much exposure they get should be up to them.
I'm a student at a university where PCs, Macs, and Unix are widely distributed, and I've found that to be a great advantage to me. I don't use MS at all on my personal system, but an awful lot of people do. I work tech support at my university and support the mostly MS userbase. I write software to run on Linux and document it in Word, because I'm familiarizing myself with all of the available tools of my chosen trade.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
How about, instead of banning MS software, this person offers to subsidize faculty/staff/student purchases for non-MS licenses.
... just an idea. Don't lock MS out, just make it more attractive to NOT use them.
Buy a Mac, get 20% subsidized. Buy a software license for something that directly competes with an MS app or license and have his fund kick in some money.
This would certainly work for Unix boxes.. but maybe you could even offer discounts for x86 boxes that were preinstalled with Linux.. if the faculty/staff/student signs a contract to NOT install an MS product on it.
This person could even kick in money to make an open-office package the standard for the university. $500K for training and deployment of an opensource office suite.. plus the licensing money they'd save!
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
I got my CS degree at the College of NJ, and I got exposed to PCs(windows),PCs (Linux), MACs, and SUNs. Most of my software development happened inside a text editor on a unix machine(no IDE necessary for quality code). The beauty of this setup is CHOICE. You get to use the technology that works best for you. The idea of higher education is to master the concepts idependent of platform. Having platform choices greatly expanded my skill set during college. It would be a shame to prevent new students from having that same experience.
-ted
When I was in school, I did all my English papers in LateX. Probably overkill, but there is nothing like compiling your paper before printing it out!
The story didn't mention that they had to throw out their current boxes at all, just that their future upgrades wouldn't involve actually buying Microsoft products.
This does not eliminate PC hardware, as the majority of operating systems currently available run on it. There is absolutely no stipulation that they have to buy a Mac at all.
As for the concerns that former Windows users will be lost in a *nix environment (probably involving a KDE or Gnome window manager)...er, you're trying to tell me that this category of user is any more adept at using Windows?
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
To me, that is the most interesting puzzle. What would motivate him/her to donate so much money? I sense Lindows in the background...
You guys are overlooking the biggest point here.... If the university takes the money, they are stating that they are for sale. Curriculum should be based on the market/industry/etc -- whatever that is -- Who's to say that someone won't come in and say "I will give you 10 million" if you only teach american history but skip the civil war. This isn't about resources, chairs or desks, this is about preparing students for a job and one (rich) man shouldn't be able to decide what students should or shouldn't learn.
Then I could just say whatever crossed my mind, and somehow expect everybody to believe me no matter how stupid I was.
> > The words college and university are to some extent regionalisms.
> Actually, they're not. There are national standards boards in the
> U.S. and Canada that determine what constitutes a college
> and what constitutes a university. Universities offer graduate
> programs (masters, PhD, law); colleges do not.
Actually, in Canada, colleges grant diplomas and universities grant degrees. You go to a college to learn how to program, how to fix motorcycles, how to dye hair, and how to maintain an assembly line. You go to a university to learn about designing software systems, engineering motorcycles, synthesizing hair dye, and designing the robots on an assembly line.
And of course, the other posters are right on the money, the original poster was talking about regional colloquialisms, nothing else.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
So many of you Linux advocates sound like complete hypocrites for supporting this deal. They're talking about the complete end of Microsoft products (a self-imposed MS ban, if you will) at this school for all time, and it's being hailed as a victory for the cause. You've once again shown that the open source movement really is "all about choice"... the choice to use any type of *nix you want, that is, and to go to hell if you use anything else. Slashdot constantly lambasts Bill Gates for these kinds of anti-competitive tactics, but once it's anti-MS, it's fine and dandy. Fucking hypocrites... I should have known.
Georgia Tech's CS department seems to be about equally divided into two camps, MS and *NIX, with a small fringe element going to Macs. Now, most of the students I deal with seem to love using the *NIX systems, and the main undergrad CS cluster dual boots RH7.3 and Win2k, each box spending most of its time in RH. The ultrasparc solaris workstations see a lot of use, too. Some of the early-on required CS courses teach the use of gcc, lint (proprietary but TASTY!), dbx (I like it better than gdb simply because gdb doesn't handle threads very well), and some other linux/solaris tools.
:) Most of them panic the moment they see a non-windows machine they're forced to use. Maybe they'll like OS X.
However, the curriculum for some required courses still focuses or uses in some integral manner proprietary utilities from Microsoft. Additionally, MS has launched this MSDN:Academic Alliance program, whereby CS students at GT (and presumably at other schools) can download and use for free just about any MS recent software that exists, be it application, development tool, or operating system altogether. Are these MS tools better or easier to use than their free counterparts? Not in my experience. gcc is still the best compiler out there, IMHO, and nothing beats eclipse for java. poseidon/dia make great visio replacements (for UML purposes at least), OpenOffice does everything I need for office functionality. Savvy students have no problem doing without a windows-based environment/curriculum at GT.
The problem is when you bring non-CS students into the picture
I dislike Microsoft intensely - I think they are a great negative force in the software industry and have done much to crush innovation in the desktop PC platform.
BUT I think any university that considers taking a grant like this is making a mistake. University policies should be based on intellectual and academic goals, not who has the bucks to buy them off. It is repugnant in the worst way.
How about changing the restriction on the donation to this:
The university may spend the money only on non-Microsoft computer goods and services. That includes no computers with Microsoft software pre-loaded, or Microsoft licenses to run on blank computers.
This would not restrict choice - Microsoft wouldn't be banned from the campus - but it would put other options (Mac, Linux, etc. etc) in front of the student and faculty.
What is the going volume discount for Lindows PCs at walmart.com? $2,400,000/7000 students is just over $340 per seat, which should cover the tab for hardware and software. How many donors can say they donated a PC for every student in the school? How can they pass up that deal?
What a stupid and moronic concept.
Hey ! My university teach aerospatial engineering to students. But they don't teach at all about Boeing technologies. Why ? Well, we just don't happen to like the company.
Whatever. A college that teach *nix only, or MS only, is a VERY dumb college.
I think it really depends on the type of school
if it is a IT/tech type of school go for it as these students would probably love to have Linux on the desktop
if it is a business/marketing/teaching.... (Basically anything other than IT/tech/science) then I would stay with MS because these people just don't care about the OS, they just want to get the job done on a system that they are familiar with. Given that MS in on 90%+ of the desktops out there then the OS they are familiar with is most probably MS.
also consider the hidden costs like
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
First of all a completely non-MS school would not be removing choice in any way that is different from the many, many all MS schools I have seen. Computer science and graphic design departments aside, most schools are all MS already, forcing students to learn that good competing systems also exist and are much cheaper is a good thing. It's a guarantee they have already been exposed to MS stuff so let the school provide them another option and if they don't like it let them go out and spend the money for the MS shit. My money is on the students liking the alternatives.
Second of all, when it comes to students wanting to learn Visual Studio and Win32 because that's what they'll be using in the "real world", they don't have a clue. I work for a well respected software company and I have only used Linux and Solaris through my college years. Still when I am forced against my own will to use Win32 and Visual Studio at work I run circles around the people who only know MS. For some reason engineers who only know the MS environment are not as sharp. They never seem to know how things actually work and they have trouble learning. They usually have spent their technical lives learning abstractions created by MS that end up being more complicated and confusing than the standard stuff they should have known in the first place before they were given the title of engineer.
I am Soooooooooo NAKED!!!!!
A 6-year-old Mac will usually run a word processor about as well as a current mid-grade PC running Windows.
Mysteriously, however, a 6-year-old PC running Windows can barely boot these days -- even though it ran just fine 6 years ago.
Makes ya wonder, huh?
I used to have a 486-66 with 32 MB of RAM, ATI Mach 64 PCI card, on-board Symbios SCSI adaptor (ASUS PV-something-or-other motherboard). Loaded up Windows '95 just fine, I could even play that weezer video while dragging around the window it was playing in (with full-window-move turned on via Win95 Plus Pack).
Oddly enough, you can't even INSTALL a current version of Windows on a box like that anymore, but a current Linux distro would probably perform as well now as a current one would have then.
For that matter, I am typing this on a Pentium-166 running Windows 98 which is DEFINATELY slower than that old 486 was (in terms of user experience). And it has 64 MB more RAM, for God's sake!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
But the terms are unacceptable. The College has a mission that unfortunately has to include Microsoft products. Until there are better apps, they need to know Microsoft. There are ads for MCSE's and others related to Microsoft. Microsoft is the standard as much as you'd hate it. Tell the alum that they will try to expand into other products such as Linux and Unix, but due to mission of the College they could not guarantee that it would never be spent on Microsoft products.
Gorkman
Buy Macs for students who don't have computers, or set up a fund to help students get their own Mac or non-MS box if they couldn't otherwise afford it.
... my music studio doesn't run any Microsoft and we have the best stuff). Same would go for the school newspaper or any other print publishing. Macs have always been the leader in this stuff and it is easy to buy and use them ... no IT required oftentimes (often the IT put up their nose at Macs and say they don't support them anyway, so users have been getting by even when Macs used to be a little harder to admin than they are now).
... it is compatible with any computer with 802.11b or 802.11g so it even serves Microsoft stuff although it doesn't require any Microsoft stuff itself.
... you add a lot of capabilities when you go from 8 Windows systems to 8 Windows systems and a Mac OS X system.
... they are just going to run NT in a partial emulator, like Apple ran Mac OS 9 in a partial emulator in Mac OS X. With MS, it is not a different 20 year old OS in the box, though, it's a few years old and it's the same OS. What is it going to cost to move all your Microsoft kit to the "new, improved, security-included, ready-for-the-Internet" versions? Here, we just moved to Mac OS X so we know that's a bit of a bitch, but it feels good once your'e there and you have UNIX all over the place making a good foundation for all of your efforts. Microsoft is just starting this and it's going to hit their customers like tons and tons of bricks. Many of the Windows softwares in use out there don't have developers anymore and now have only MS alternatives, too, so MS will be even stronger in this go-around of licensing. They said nobody was willing to pay extra for security in the past (because they all thought they were getting it included) so your school will be paying Bill Gates for the security that you've been paying Symantec to halfway bolt-on to Windows in the past. This is coming ... it's not speculation, it just sounds so spectacular that nobody can believe it.
Set up or add to the existing video-editing or music or art studios (again, you would do this with Macs and need no Microsoft stuff even if you were allowed to buy Microsoft
Set up an 802.11g network using Apple hardware
Replace some Web servers with little servers running a UNIX-based OS such as Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, etcetera.
Hire a consultant to come in and turn all your DOS systems (Windows 95/98/Me) into Linux systems. These DOS systems are very unstable and very insecure and cost loads of money to retire or update to the newest Microsoft stuff. Convert them to Linux and you can often fill the job of an older system.
Establish a fund to train all your "Microsoft drone" IT types on basic UNIX support so that they know how to work a common UNIX shell, and the basics of what parts of UNIX they can expect to find and use in all UNIX systems (including the Internet, and even MS stuff where it pretends to be UNIX at certain levels like TCP/IP).
Buy a single Mac OS X system for each department, so that the people there can gradually learn what this is all about, so that next time they are getting new desktops or notebooks, they'll be more inclined to look beyond the same-old MS choice and they'll know the Mac will work for them because they already ran their own software on it; already tried it. Even if they never transition, the built-in video editing and many other features that SUCK in the comparable Microsoft product will be a nice add-on to any computer lab. So you can use the existing stuff for whatever, but you'll see some stuff done on DVD video here and there
Hire a new IT guy with Mac OS X and Linux experience and put him in charge of "cross-platform computing". Have him make up plans for gradually strengthening the IT infrastructure by moving some more servers to Linux and more desktops to Mac OS X. Make sure to establish goals such as "once we move this server to Linux, we hope to see it become twice as reliable; and have less than 1% of the virus problems" and "once we move this lab to Mac OS X, we expect desktop users to have no viruses and generally suffer one crash per year" (that's my experience with 4 Mac OS X systems over 2 years). It will be easy for this guy to just go around and save everybody time and trouble and money with his non-Microsoft knowledge. He could pay for himself, easy, actually.
Pay a consultant to do a study of where your IT is now and where it will probably be in five years and what the advantages of Apple over Microsoft would be in that time, or Linux over Microsoft where that makes sense. Microsoft is putting a PC emulator into Windows 2003 Server because their business clients can't port their custom apps from Windows NT to Windows 2003 Server without it
Buy QuickTime Pro licenses. They are cheap as shit and any Mac or Windows computer you put them on suddenly knows like 50 media types. This stuff is indispensible for media people (artists, musicians, etcetera). QuickTime Pro 6 also has all the MPEG-4 stuff (MS Office: Mac exports and plays MPEG-4 on the Mac because of QuickTime 6) so you are getting ready for that.
Replace any Outlook email with good, industry-standard email that doesn't have viruses. Microsoft's email viruses are most galling because email is the Internet's most popular app and now people are afraid of it, and are afraid of embarrassing themselves by "taking down the network" by "opening the wrong mail". It's sad and it's worth fixing if you can.
There is a universe of computing outside of MS, but it looks smaller because very few are competing directly with MS. I'm a writer, but I don't use a "word processor" because if your app is a "word processor" Microsoft will stomp you. In place of that we have wicked HTML/XML/text editors that make standard documents. The rest of the industry has just kept quietly moving towards the future while Microsoft has its tantrums and their users throw up their hands and use computers less and less.
and it's one-off? They don't know much about how Microsoft deals with competition. In this situation, Microsoft will offer twice as much in term of purchase coupons over 3, 5 or 7 contracts, and it'll be all done before next board meeting. :)
:)
Tell your grandpa to call Microsoft if he wants to save MORE money.
199.99 for a linux computer. nuff said.
I would bet this offer borders on illegal... depending on who the source of finacial backing is, this could be considered anti-competitive. My money is on the fact that this IS someone involved in the industry who would love nothing more than to start paying off schools to make the switch. This reminds me of the auto-body paint industry. Often dealers will pay off the shop owners/foremen with cash to get them to buy supplies from them and not competing paint/supplies dealers. Highly illegal, except who's telling?
I used to be a MS fan but then I was brainwashed. Now I see the Light. Mac OS X pwns u.
All Microsoft-bashing aside, and with all due respect, this donor's idea is novel but misguided.
While I think it would be good for undergrads to be exposed to non-Microsoft software and operating systems, most students *need* to become facile with products such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Windows OS in general. These are skills that many, if not most employers look for and/or require.
I, myself, am what most people would call a UNIX geek -- probably not a hacker by most standards, but I'm generally at home on Linux, Solaris, or FreeBSD, to name a few. For most of my daily work, I use one UNIX or another. On the other hand, when it comes to email, word processing, generating presentations, pretty graphs for management, and the like, I turn to my Windows PC to get the job done; yes, I could use OpenOffice and Emacs and so forth to accomplish the same functions, but my coworkers all use Word and Excel and Powerpoint, so I need to be compatible. Moreover, having tried it both ways, I find the Microsoft approach faster and easier than using the UNIX equivalents.
From a more general perspective, who's going to hire a writer (tech write, journalist, etc.) who doesn't know Word and can't use Windows? Look at job listings, in or out of the computer industry, and you'll find that knowing Microsoft's products is a prerequisite for the vast majority of the positions (where such knowledge would be relavent -- carpenters don't usually need to know Word!).
I think that forcing students to use non-Microsoft products for *some* of their work would be a good thing -- particularly if those non-Microsoft products run on Linux or another UNIX. It broadens their perspective, build confidence in their ability to learn and master another operating envoronment, and I think would generally enhance their educational experience. That being said, it seems clear to me that forcing them to use *all* non-Microsoft products would be bad for them in the long run.
If this donor really cares about the students whom he hopes to help with this money, he should rethink the parameters of his donation and, frankly, get real. Yes, Microsoft is rather evil, but they're also very successful -- IMHO, much of that success derives from the fact that their products generally enhance one's productivity and one's ability to communicate and work with others. I wish there were another widely-used alternative, but there isn't, not right now, and it's short-sighted to force folks to behave otherwise.
I admire the potential giver's probable intent, but I feel I must point out the following:
Forcing the institution to adopt a certain policy or lose the grant is a Bad Thing. It flies in the face of academic freedom. I could hurt the students. It could seriously damage the institution's reputation. If the board has a majority of non-idiots, they will turn it down.
That said, I rather hope the poster is overstating the case.
It is quite common, and in my opinion a Good Thing, to stipulate conditions under which the money from *your grant* can be spent.
If I want to give $2.4+ million to a university, and I don't want a penny of that to go to [company I dislike], then I should structure the terms of my gift such that [company I dislike] is not getting any of it. After all, it's *my* gift. Nobody will hold that against me, and my political purpose (anti-[company I dislike] advocacy) will be well served, and the overall environment of the institution will be only the richer for it.
This happens all the time. Think of things like:
+ a new building for Mechanical Engineering (*not* for literature!)
+ a "conservative|liberal" "think-tank" (*not* for people of radically opposite views!)
+ an endowed professorship in [group of your choice] Studies (*not* for members of another group!)
These are all Good Things when private individuals endow them, even if they could be Bad Things if the government or the university's board were to underwrite them.
Institutional coersion is always a Bad Thing, and will be remembered as such. I hope your grandfather will lobby the generous patron to tie strings only to his/her own money, and lobby the board to graciously accept the donation only under that condition.
This Like That - fun with words!
Thats nuts, the students will mainly be used to Microsoft products. It will only cause more of a head ache for the University. For example, in my college there are plenty of nice, brand new, iMacs (running Mac OS X 10.2) , which IMHO is a very easy to use OS, yet I hear complaints almost daily by students on how much they hate macs and can't use anything but windows simply because they are used to it. Its astonishing but its reality.
Most people go to college to get a degree, to get a career to make a living. That is a real-world answer if you ask a college student. This is the way I felt when I went to school.
During my time in a small school's CompSci program, I was exposed to many different programming environments, including Windows and a very young Linux (at the time).
I think it would have been profoundly wrong to deny myself and my peers (other students) the ability to use M$ stuff in college. One of the major recruiters on campus was MicroSquish. A lot of my friends got jobs with them, or programming in a Windows environment for someone else. I also know people working in Sun, AIX, HP-UX, Mac and Linux environments. However, the majority of programmers I know from college are on M$ in some fashion or another for their daily work lives.
While I admire the spirit of the donation in question, I think it would be detrimental to not allow the individual student the choice to take advantage of all career paths available.
Use the money to promote Linux, but don't blackmail the school by doing it. Maybe insist that none of the money can be used to by machines that will ever run M$, or M$ software. But don't take the freedom of choice away from kids trying to get a job in a tough economy.
That is from a purely CompSci perspective.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
simple rule: if equiv functionality exists on non-M$, then you must use non-M$.
for all things that need M$ apps, you can run them.
so for word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing, compiling, operating systems study, etc - you can use unix or whatever.
but if there's a killer app that is only on M$, no reason to hobble the college.
perhaps give an incentive (extra bonus) if the college sees one of these exceptions and embarks on a plan to have its students (as a graded project) write a replacement that is based on opensource platforms.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I don't understand all the people saying it's a bad idea. WTF? It's the principle of the whole deal.
We can't all agree, but I think a majority of us think Microsoft should be stuffed into a friggin huge black box with a bunch of concrete and tossed into the artic ocean. If just one University could go to meeting required by Microsoft to explain why they won't be using their products and say, "They're paying me this much" it would be beautiful. Now given, Micros~1 could fire back easily beating that donation, but it's the principle of the idea.
Here come the flames, "People rely on Micros~1", and I got but one thing to say to that -- "Screw those people. Let them use StarOffice"
I mean what is the point? OK Linux is non-vocational. Is there anything so bad about teaching the kids software they might actually need to know about in a job Jesus.
My mother was an educator, and this was one of her favorite sayings - - that the greatest gift you can give a student is an interest in continued learning. Learning how to learn is of the utmost importance. So, in the situation described here, one might put forward the idea that the potential for exploration through contact with Open Source software is inherently greater than that from working with restrictive, proprietary products. With Microsoft software, you have a tool. With Open Source software, you own a foundry.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Let's not pretend it takes a genius to use a word-processor. Sufficed to say, ANYONE who can use GNU/Linux and it's corresponding applications can alwso use MS Windows and it's corresponding applications. No-one is going to be rejected for a job because they haven't have experience specifically with MS Word, or any other MS products. Sufficed to say, experience in any GNU/Linux office suite easily translates over to MS Office, with a small learning curve. Far more important than experience with a specific office suite, is one's ability to type fastly and one's general computer savvyness.
/.ers making these comments about the necessity of experience with MS Word haven't been in the real world that much. In terms of real-world publishing and document creation, MS Word is total and complete crap. First of all, I haven't encountered a version of MS Word yet that doesn't "fight the user". You put something in one place, MS Word thinks it's better somewhere else. The result? Headaches and documents that often appear unprofessional. It takes both an extra-ordinary knowledge of MS Word to create professional document using it, and an extra-ordinary amount of patience to do so, as well as an extra-ordinary amount of time.
Maybe many
You want to make an article for a news-paper, a book, or a scientific paper? Professional business statement, etc? MS Word is total crap. Why? Because it relies completely on the users ability to manually typset. Users, naturally, make documents that are typsetted to look "pretty". "Pretty" would be fine if you were hanging documents on walls like paintings. But you aren't. Documents aren't meant to be looked at with cursory appreciation. They are meant to be read in depth.
I am not trying to say that OpenOffice -- or any other Office suite -- is superior to MS in that regard. All of them rely on the user -- who is almost invariably completely ignorant of professional typesetting standards -- to produce a professional document. What I am saying, however, is that in the GNU/Linux world, an alternative is available which allows for the painless creation of professional documents, requiring no previous knowledge of the details of typesetting by the user for the particular document-style. This is called TeX and LaTeX, which are frontended by an easy-to-use graphical document processor, LyX.
What this allows people to do is to focus on the content of the documents they create, and not the formatting. LyX handles the formatting, according to well-established professional rules. The result is that the user saves time, because (s)he does not have to spend time and effort formatting the document to look quasi-professional. Instead, the document is automatically formatted to look 100% professional according to the standards of the document that the user specified (e.g., there are very specific guidelines for formatting in scientific papers, which are different from scientific thesis', which are different from scientific reviews).
I myself am coming from a scientific (biological) background. As an undergraduate in college, I had written lab-reports and review-articles. Initially, I wrote these using MS Word, which was a huge pain in the ass. You insert a figure, put it somewhere, and word places it somewhere else. And of course you have to bother with the trivial details of perfectly aligning the figure legend with the figure, equations, and so on and so forth. LyX does all this for you, and allows you to focus on content. The results are invariably more professional than those produced by MS Word. LyX does not mistakenly put two spaces after a section title when there should be only one, nor commit any of the other various mistakes that you may make while formatting a document yourself. Furthermore, it provides complete consistency with professional standards, not some hacked-up bullshit standards that you yourself define ad-hoc.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I used to be anti-Microsoft but then I realized that Microsoft is actually a pretty good business. I mean, Bill Gates probably wrote a ton of the original source code, which means that he's the main author and the guy responsible for making Windows so popular. Microsoft is really just a marketing genius though. Once you learn how to create a monopoly, you will continue to create a monopoly. It's why the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. The rich keep doing the things that make them money and the poor keep doing things that keep them poor.
Certainly, some of the things Microsoft has done can piss off most of the serious community, but that doesn't mean their OS is worth even less. Windows XP is a lot easier to use than the new Redhat Distro, and while I know a lot of people are thinking "Well, Apple is easier to use still," the realization here is that ease of use is the PRIMARY importance of an average user of a computer. They don't care about flexibility, they just want to feel like they know what they are doing.
This means, that for most people, Microsoft's Windows is going to be the choice that will serve them best. They are going to be going out into the real world and probably using these machines, and then when they get there they won't know how to use them.
My advice is that you have a "serious emphasis" on open source around the university, but I wouldn't eliminate all your MS machines.
Entire campus a Microsoft free zone? Brilliant! Plenty of people would eagerly contribute to that, I sure would.
Linux not being ready for the desktop is pure BS. Some big Linux promoter like IBM would probably be HAPPY to help with a project like this. People would turn out from all over to assist in such an effort.
The big downside of Linux today (and the only one, really) is rapid interchange of documents with MS Office users. This is an artifical barrier that makes it impractical for most businesses to consider Linux for the end user. However, the issue is far less relevant to a campus community which can largely do whatever it damn well wants. In a college/university setting you're probably not sitting there all day getting business-critical MS Office attachments that you have to bat back instantaneously with comments and revisions. OpenOffice does work extremely well with its own documents. It's just the interchange with MS Office that's a little rocky.
You need a little IMAGINATION folks, not petty bean counting bullshit. No, the $2.4 million does not in itself economically justify this, but it is sure a hell of a nice seed to start something with VASTLY more economic, PR and educational potential.
(The again, maybe the lead post WAS a TROLL...)
... IBM. Boards like beans. They aren't swayed by warm and fuzzy philosophies, nor are they swayed by mercurial guesswork as to potential financial savings from people without intimidating business cards. Enter IBM.
... I might have to start a band just so I can name it that.
... *running to my local copyright office* :)
I would really, really suggest arming your grandfather with as many high-caliber charts and numbers as you can coax from the mighty Blue. When IBM speaks, suits listen.
I've worked, a bit, with the PR dept. of their Linux initiatives division in the past, and I can assure you that they love to help push pro-Linux campaigns like the one you describe. Having done that for a while now, I'm sure they have amassed a library of credible and well-documented evidence regarding the benefits of Linux over Windoze, especially as relates to TCO. Hell, they probably have a library of source material specifically for colleges.
Anyway, if I were you I'd contact someone in the IBM Linux division and ask for some help. At the very least you'll get some solid docs to help bolster your case. Depending on the circumstances, you might end up getting even more significant help than that. Cases like the one you describe are precisely why having (well-behaved) corporations anchoring the tug-of-war line is so crucial to the Linux movement.
- nocturne
p.s. Nobody use the phrase "arming your grandfather"
Oh wait, this is going to show up on the internet, huh
Let me just present my own situation. I go to a college of 12,000+ and we have many computer clusters. Most are split between PC's and Mac's. The Mac's are used, but few use them willingly. It's mostly because the Pc's are always busy, so someone jumps on a MAc until a Pc opens up. We are presented with a choice between MAC and PCS, and I routintely see half a cluster comprised of unused MACs, simply to be fair and have a 50/50 ratio.
Inversely, our CS department is solely comprised of Linux and Linux programming. Everything is done in the console, and all programs are compiled with gcc. The result is that my roommate who's a CS senior with a high GPA is completely inept in Windows. I'm a business major, when he asks me for help routinely. While some will say that maybe he's dumb, the truth is that he doesn't play with computers in his free time, most of his work is done for school. Therefore, he has minimal Windows knowledge for his own computer in the apartment, and when presented with a problem is completely lost. I once asked him to create a "Hello World" program for Windows, and after 30 minutes he gave up, despite having Visual Studio at his disposal. His entire class and department has the same issues, because he's been taught in a Slashdot-type of community. His teachers routinely make fun of MS and all their tools, and refuse to use them. They have a vague premonition that their punishing MS and making a statement, but the only ones being hurt are the students. I left the CS department for these reasons, as did many others, being an overly passionate Linux junky is unfair to students dependant on the leadership of thier teachers. There's something to be said about intuitive OS and software.
I remember all the kids in elementary school who never had a computer at home. All they had ever used was the Apples and Macs at their school. When they got to workplaces and had to use IBMs with Windows, they had very little experience.
They realized what your college should realize.
It's a reality that unless you're going into the arts, most of your experience should be with Wintel if you wish it to be useful.
This is not Anti-MS, Anti-Apple, or anything like that. The same argument goes against getting WordPerfect instead of Word. They should know how to use Word simply because it's what is most likely going to be required of them.
If he was going to give them the money anyway I think this would be a great statement. Microsoft will vanish after the end of this year anyway so in the long run you might make history by saying that you helped nail the steak into the heard of Microsoft by keeping them out of this University and at the same time showing the students, faculty and others in the media that there are open source alternatives waiting in the wings to take up the slack. We'll all be better off in a world where the GPL rules!
who thinks this might be a less than subtle attempt to get Microsoft's team of crack PR monkeys to come swooping in scattering a few million dollars worth of licenses about the place? or am I just getting cynical...
One thing I've espoused for quite some time is to standardise on a technology, not an implementation. For example, rather than using MS Exchange, standardise on SMTP and IMAP. Rather than standardising on Mozilla, make sure all of your web apps produce valid HTML. This allows you to easily swap out one server package for another if you need to and allows people to choose their own clients (though you could always enforce specific clients for support reasons).
Now, certainly this is not always possible in all cases. There isn't, afaik, a standard for spreadsheet documents for example.
It seems to me that if more companies took this approach, they'd be better off. Email server overloaded? Add an additional server or swap it out for other software that scales better. The end-users don't even need to know.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
As a recent alum (4-years) and current grad student at a large state school, I fully understand why people put strings on donations.
People remember certain positive/negative events of their university time and want to reinforce/cure them with their donations. Eg. someone loved going to football games so they support a stadium.
In my case, the university put a "saftey cylinder" around an open fountain for which it had been a tradition for students to play in the water. Admin claimed it was for saftey reasons because unsupervised small childern were playing on campus (someone threatened to sue). But why are unsupervised children a concern on a campus full of adults? The class of 1939, which donated the fountain, was enraged it was being destroyed but couldn't stop the change. Because of this incident, I will never donate to any sort of aesthetic or beautification project on the grounds some nanny-state wacko might declare it unsafe in the future.
Projects I might donate to:
Libraries or study space for students
Parking facilities designated for students
Merit-only based scholarships
Merit-based "reverse affirmitive action" scholarships (whites, asians, and/or males, in engineering)
All of these are because of specific experiences I had as a undergrad. If I donate "unrestricted funds" they might use them to put fences around fountains, convert student lab space to administrative offices (actually happened), or support what I consider discriminatory policies.
The department knows this and is currently trying to quietly convert medium-sized donors from giving scholarship money (very popular) to giving unrestricted funds (rather unpopular).
First, who exactly is providing this money? Why do they have so much against Microsoft, that they would offer money only if you choose to boycott their products?
Non-MS products are good and fine for some of us, but face it: when these people graduate, and go out in the real world, they will be using Windows XP at work, using MS Word for everything, creating PowerPoint slides...
These people will, in most cases, be using Windows and Microsoft Office at home. At school they'll be lost with Gnome and OpenOffice (or whatever).
I just think that whoever made this offer has some serious problems (and, some serious money to support his personal agenda)... but unfortunately, to prepare the students for what they will face in the real world, you need to let them use MSIE, MS Word, Windows, etc...
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
Ok, maybe my mind is on hydrogen cars because of the recent article, maybe it's because I always compare computers to cars, but basically, this will look the same to many people as stating that you cannot drive a gasoline-powered car if you attend this University.
What does restricting your car choice have to do with education? Absolutley nothing! What does restricting your vendor choice have to do with education? Absolutley nothing! While I dislike Microsoft as much as any of you (I am currently unemployed, despite knowing I could get hired by MS if I wanted that), how stupid does this make the University look? You can only decide that something sucks if you actually get to see what it is. Remember how much we laugh at those religious organizations that boycott movies without actually seeing them? Censorship is bad, mkay?
What I would propose to the donor is that the University use their money to use for the purchase of Microsoft-free technology: Linux, Mac, Solaris, whatever. These purchases would not affect the normal purchasing of such systems, so that if they were going to spend $1 Million on linux boxes, this year they'll now be spending $3.4 million. And since Linux is largely free / low-cost, those millions can go quite a way.
Often what is needed in a situation like this is a beach head... if the board sees that they can get 10 Linux boxes for the price of one MS-equiped box, and that people aren't seeing any other major differences, which do you think they'll buy in the future?
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
It seems that students and their education is at the tops of most minds here.. It seems to me any professor chooses whatever he deems necessary, or likes for that matter, regardless of which alumn donates whatever amount of money.. You're overlooking the college infrastructures, MS is nothing short of a pain in the arse, lock in, weak mind hypnosis trick, non-integrating, non-scaling, user friendly, enemy of integrated enterprise computing. Make the Linux desktop work, no excuses.
Heh, he is giving 2.4mil to get people to use free software... Boy was he duped. hehe
As has been proven by every impartial study done (those funded by MS don't count), the TCO of a GNU/Linux system is just cheaper than that of a Windows system. I won't go into all of the reasons, but will list a few:
1. Upgrades are free ($).
2. Initial acquirement is free ($).
3. Support can be purchased on a competitive basis among competing companies, thus producing superior support. How many times have you called up inept technical support guys who obviously don't know what the fuck they're talking about, can't speak English, know less about the system than you do, and are obviously reading from a TO-DO cookbook, which ends in "if all else fails, tell them to wipe the hard-drive and reinstall everything"? The simple fact is, there's a reasonable solution for the vast majority of problems you run into, which doesn't involve reinstalling everything from scratch.
Call up a windows support guy and complain that your computer won't start up due to a corrupted IO.sys file. What will he tell you? He'll take you through the usual motions, and then -- invariably -- tell you there's nothing else you can do, back up your data, and reinstall the OS (conveniently ignoring the fact that it's difficult if not impossible to back up one's data when one can only boot into DOS and has no access to the CD-writer). He will tell you this despite the fact that there is a much simpler solution, which is simply to replace the corrupt IO.sys file with a valid working one. Why can't he tell you that, or send you the file that would allow you to do that? Because the technical support contract doesn't support that. Don't like your technical support contract options? Too fucking bad, there's no alternative.
Not so with GNU/Linux. First of all, such problems are rarely encountered, even in the rare case where a power failure occurs, due to journaling file-systems. Secondly, technical support can be purchased at a competitive price -- which means, ultimately, cheaper for you if you section out the tech-support aspect of your bill from a proprietary vendor. It also means better service.
GNU/Linux also provides the benefit of being able to run on much older hardware than does Windows, allowing the university to upgrade their hardware less frequently. Microsoft apparently thinks that it needs to provide hardware developers with motivation to produce better hardware by continually increasing requirements that it's software need to run acceptably. Though this is true with regards to some modern bloat-ware in GNU/Linux, there are always non-bloatware alternatives which are usually just as functional, if not more so. KDE and GNOME can be replaced with the lighter Xfce. The bloated WM's that come with them can be replaced by the streamlined and elegant WindowMaker.
Let's not forget some of the obvious benefits. Universities are big organizations, which can afford to fix their own problems if given the means. Because GNU/Linux uses FS and OSS software, universities can fix their own problems. Indeed, they need not even pay for the solution -- they can simply throw a problem at CS students to solve, making it a mandatory part of the course.
Let's not pretend that the university would be denying students choice by not buying MS products. These students could use whatever they want on their own computers. Exposing them to Linux at the libraries and other public areas would expose them to an operating system which is more likely than not the direction of the future. MS may be the dominant force, but it has no-where to go but down, and it's insistence on making crappy products, illegally using it's monopoly power, and depriving consumers of their rights will certainly accelerate its downfall. On the contrary, GNU/Linux is gaining more and more support. It is growing extremely quickly, and is a fertile ground for new ideas and innovation.
Finally, exposing students to Linux exposes them to the way computer's really work. Linux -- though it now has easy-to-use inte
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
At the risk of stating the obvious, why is everyone chiming about OSS? What about the Mac?
This is a horrible idea.
Students need to know both Microsoft and Unix after they graduate. We need competent and versatile programmers who can do unix AND also Windows programming without having to spend half their time reading the fucking API manual because they wasted so much time on unix in college. You will be doing your students a great disservice.
Why don't you or your grandfather ask the guy donating the money for the reasons why they shouldn't go with Microsoft. After all, it's the donators stipulation.
Yes, I agree that it's wrong to block somebody out. But having said that, perhaps installing straight *nix would do some good.
No, really. If one learned how to code *without* the heavy reliance on many of the closed API's that make Windows what it is? I'm talking something entirely unheard of in this day and age: not necessarily bare-metal programming (which again limits, but now due to the platform), but starting by building in such a way that portability becomes largely...well, modular.
Mod me down if you will - this is after all an uneducated thought off the top of my head. But perhaps in the end this might prove beneficial in a sort of roundabout way.
This sig no verb.
My university signed this thing with microsoft called 'Campus Agreement'. Basically it means they get MS software really cheap, almost free for the students, but tha catch is that this "Agreement" is exclusive. They're not allowed to work other similar liceses. This results classes about VB programming, where there used to be C++ and Pascal courses. This happened after I graduated, so I did enyoy learning a lot of different languages, but now, that's a thing of the past, thanks (again) to MS (or should I say M$?) As for my favorite language, C/C++, they could be using one of Borland's tools (C++ Builder, Kylix), but as a product of the agreement, they're stuck with the very inferior Visual C++.
I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
I'm a bit confused by that statement. What is CS supposed to be about, then?
I'm even more confused by the fact that every other apparently more important thing in CS you mention is accesory to programming:
- AI: how to program a machine to make its own decisions.
- Design: how to plan what you're going to program, before you program, so that it is a GOOD program.
- Testing: how to make sure your program works, by defining what it means "it works" and forcing it to comply.
- Formal Specifications: how to define formally your program, so other people can understand it and tell you whether it was the program they wanted or not.
- Project Management: how to make it possible (if improbable) that you'll finish your ambitious and complicated group of programs.
I don't care if you're "programming" a Windows client in C++ with MFC libs, on a Unix machine running LISP, or on a "pen-and-paper-human-assisted" platform where you trace your program to get your results.
If you're executing an algorithm, you're executing a program, and you're computing.
If you're writing an algorithm, you're programming, and you're preparing instructions to compute. Peferably good, efficient instructions that give good results.
This "computing" thing, incidentally, is what gives "Computer/Computing" Science its name. Or so I thought until your post. Now I'm baffled trying to figure out what CS means.
Forgive me if your commented was intended along the lines of "learning a particular programming language is not what CS is about". I would agree completely with that comment, for the same reasons I think assembling and dissasembling cars does not a mechanical engineer make.
But your comment, if taken literally, sounded more like "Physics is not what Mechanical Engineering is about".
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
When I did my CS degree (many years ago) the course covered a range of theoretical and practical topics, but there wasn't much in the sylabus on COBOL, which was a very important language back then. So in my last year at Uni, I took an external training course to learn COBOL. Sure enough, my first real job was COBOL programming. (And to my shagrin, the first 2-3 weeks consisted of an on-the job COBOL course ... sigh.)
But within, 3 years I'd left that job and I was back at Uni doing a higher degree in CS. Guess what ... I've never written another COBOL program. But I've done a lot of software engineering using a wide range of programming languages, IDEs, OS platforms and so on. Very few of these were covered in any depth (or at
all) my CS degree. But that wasn't and isn't a
problem for me. If need to get up to speed in
some new language, API, technique, etc, I can usually find a training course ... or just pick it up from a text book.
I make use of basic skills and knowledge that I learned in my CS degree every day; e.g. basic programming and design, data structures, complexity theory, etc. But I wouldn't expect a CS degree to spend too much time on the nitty-gritty details of today's fashion in OS platforms ... or whatever.
A smart employer understands the difference between an employee who has had broad CS education and one who has just had technology specific training.
"[T]he board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students."
If the board is actually trying to minimize costs without considering benefits to students at all, then their decision is simple: they shouldn't buy any software for students.
My guess is that the "anonymous reader" was just engaging in rhetoric, and doesn't really mean what he wrote.
Amongst a body of so many students, I cannot imagine this flying, given teacher concerns over research computers, ease of use, etc..
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
No kidding, our labs were called outbreak because of the sheer number of viruses waiting to latch on to your floppy and come on home!
Take a look at how many viruses spread from improperly set up file shares, infected Word documents, and trojaned executables. If it's a tech school with a reputable CS/CE/EE Department, chances are they're probably going to have updated virus signatures and the virus threat to MS products is being managed. If it's a Liberal arts school thats running a loose and ragged network, then maybe it's time to look at Linux and hire a few good admins/techs.
--beacher
You could achieve almost the same results by keeping the MS OS, but adding linux as dual boot and defaulting to linux with the loader on a 30 second or so timeout.
;-)
I'm willing to bet that most people would be far to lazy to reboot just to check their hotmail or AIM or type a report or whatever. At the same time you could still have all the "compatibility" that you need for those oddball apps that just don't have equivalents under linux.
As an added bonus, the CS and other geeks get to use a proper OS that they can work with
--that's Mr. Red to you
I am currently a 3rd year student at a major university, and I must say, over the past three years, it has been very difficult living in a Windows-dominated world. However, college life has been easier than I thought it would be where this is concerned.
While I don't agree with the alumnus' decision to provide the money if and only if the non-Microsoft conditions are met, I do applaud the point he/she is trying to make. Perhaps you should recommend to your grandfather that some "negotiating" take place...for example, maybe he/she could still provide some money for technology upgrades and give extra incentives for buying non-MS products...
Just a thought from the kid in the computer lab sitting in front of one of those new G4 towers or 5-year old Sun boxes that are still lightyears ahead of Windows' time...
Given that this is not considered "a lot of money" why not instead see if you can come to a compromise. Perhaps a figure less than 2.4 million, to promise not to buy/renew any Microsoft new contracts for 7 years with a 100% refund clause on any significant violation.
7 years is an eternity for the computer industry -- if Linux cannot be able to hold its own accross the board in 7 years, then there's little point. It gives the school two possible outs -- forfeiture or just wait out the 7 year time limit before returning to MS.
A college without Microsoft is like a fish without a bicycle.
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
I am a female nerd who is in love w/ the possibility of developing online education courses thru my very small business. Not looking for the development too technical. No bells & stuff.
Want to work w/ someone who can guide me thru
putting the course online. What software to use,
etc.
I currently am a student worker in my University's ITS dept. To give you an idea about what kind of university, out of many many thousands, we're #31 (with whatever rating scheme is used). Frankly, only 2-3 people who work here in ITS are computer science majors. Most of the people are just savvy users that can learn a new app in a day instead of a year. This lends one to think that a changeover would be just a weeks worth or so of new-learning for ITS staff, but that's not true.
On the various computer classroom computers, there are at least 10 pieces of windows-only software that professors use to teach classes, and some professors (not the CS dept. interestingly enough) write their own apps for their classes.
I don't mean to speculate on whether a complete switch over would be a Good Thing (even though I think the end result would be worth it, at least in the sciences), just to show that the dependency on whatever system is in place is often rather strong.
Also, there is some handi-capped accessible software that is installed on some of the computers that we are required by law to provide, and it happens to be windows-only. (It's called ZoomText, and it's use is rather self-explanatory).
...taught more M$ stuff. It didn't teach MFCs, and alot of people are looking for C++ when they mean a MFC C++ programmer, not an ANSI programmer.
The post didn't say you have to rip out everything Microsoft and replace it with Linux. It says that they would have to agree to not buy anything from Microsoft. True, Linux is the obvious choice for new installations since it appears to be the natural successor to Windows but it could be MacOS or Sun machines or they could just keep nursing their current Microsoft software along for 10 years.
Licenses for existing software wouldn't have to be thrown out. All this does is change your buying decisions in the future. If you want to buy a new version of Windows only software you have to make sure you have Windows to run it on. If you want to run it on new hardware with some other OS, the software has to support the other OS. Eventually you would probably want to do a general roll out of a new standard OS but you could put it off as long as you would like. You wouldn't even have to do it at all if you don't want to. You'd just be stuck with very old Windows for a little while.
The support staff would simply have to learn how to admin RedHat 8 or MacOS instead of having to learn how to admin Longhorn. It's not that hard. RedHat is a breeze to install and day-to-day Linux admin is much less time consumig than Windows admin. Hiring one person who has in-depth knowledge of Linux would help steer things in the right direction and help you out of jams but for the most part you could probably get buy with the same people you have now.
I'd like to clear up some misconceptions that some Microsoft advocates have. First, Microsoft is a comodity software company. They rose to the top by making the standard software tools that everyone needs and charging less than everyone else. Second, Windows isn't popular because it is a great operating system. People forget quickly that when Windows expanded to dominate the computer industry it was horrible. The reasons it won against it's arguably superior competition were: 1) It could do pretty much everything that people needed to do 2) It did it cheaper than everyone else and 3) people could trust that they would get a good deal buy buying Microsoft stuff. None of those things are true for anymore. Linux and OpenOffice now win on all 3 points. 2 and 3 they win hands down. You can't beat free for a price and you can't beat the open source for trusting you won't get screwed. The only remaining issue is, is the software good enough? Does it do pretty much everything that people need it to? It's getting harder and harder to claim they don't. They now hold the powerful commodity software position. Microsoft is now suddenly in the premium software business and they don't know how to do that. Just like it took Microsoft a long time to displace the bloated behemoths of it's time it will take OpenSource software some time to displace the Microsoft behemoth but it will win. It's as sure a bet as Windows was 15 years ago.
No one expects you to throw out perfectly good Office 2000 suites on everyone's machines and install OpenOffice instead but when it comes time to put together a new 50 machine computer cluster are you really willing to dump $25,000 extra down the drain for pretty much the same functionality. We are living in an age where that's enough to buy the *entire* 50 machine cluster.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Have your Grandfather go to RedHat and explain the situation. Tell the RedHat Executives that they need to supply the software & support for that time period. Then they (RedHat) can use this as a case study for other schools. Additionally, RedHat can use this promotionally.
syouell@realanswers.org
nothing but chump change. Try something like the 32.5 million donated to CWRU by mogul Peter B. Lewis for leverage.
It might cost the university more than 2.5 million in legal fees. Lets think about like this: University tells MS to take a hike. MS says up-yours! your university network is responsible for X instances of piracy of Z number of MS products! And then the Redmond legal team gets involved and you shell out millions in legal defense and stopping piracy.
Damn monopolies suck.
I doubt the veracity of this story. Why would this almunus care so much about Microsoft that he'd withhold his donations unless Microsoft products weren't used? Why would someone do that? It makes no sense.
Besides, any college that doesn't teach Microsoft products is a bad college. Love them or hate them, Microsoft products are used in virtually every business sector. These graduates are going to have a hard time finding a job if they don't know how to find the Start button.
Speaking as a Pro-Linux Manager in a university environment, money talks....the trick here is to show savings that exceed the switching costs.
The hardest past is to put a price tag on "soft dollars". Some things need to be done to make it happen right.
Costs
1. CIS instructor retraining
Develop training and perform for 2,3,4 below
2. Faculty Retraining
Necessary to aid in 3,4 below
Will require new lesson plans or updates, screenshots, etc.
3. Staff Retraining
Trails 1 and 2 because it will take time to switch administrative systems.
4. Student Retraining
Happens by 2 above as part of normal classes
5. Alternative Package purchases
Recommendations:
1. There's some training out there already, including StarOffice training provided by Sun
2. Get IBM, Sun, and Oracle onboard to help plan, supply, and rollout. They will probably jump at the chance to move an entire university, as a model for other universities and businesses.
3. Sun has training (see #1 above) and trainers for staroffice that could do large on-site training.
4. IBM has trainers who can do large onsite training at a very nominal cost for large groups, get them to donate some and pay for the rest.
5. Oracle has training, administrative ERP packages aimed at university management, etc. as well as Linux training and Support.
6.Ask Alumn for time frame for switching....you're looking at a 2-3 year project for the administrative systems, unless you get IBM/Sun/Oracle to supply a small army of consultants, trainers, etc.
7. Try to put a number on "soft dollars" i.e. "Look how much time and personnel costs we can save by moving to reliable, managable servers and desktops..."
8. Discuss the future of IT and business, desktop, and home users. MS may be in use today, but that's chainging faster than most MS fans would like to admit. People are hiring Linux users NOW...
Also, contrary to popular MS fan beliefs...Linux users can run MS with a minimum of trouble...
The reverse is not as true.
These funds do not just go for people getting CS degrees. Computer labs, art departments, secretaries, on and on. And i will tell you this, unless someone is in to computers, and youve all seen it, they are completly programmed for MS computing. At a web cafe, i recently added a linux machine, and the first customer to use it came up to the counter and said the computer was broken. Well i got the call, and it turns out he didnt see the IE icon on the desktop and could get no further. THIS is the problem, and id wager even people with a masters in some non computer related field do the same thing.
Why does this happen? Because people become homoginized on MS software, and dont REALLY learn how to use a computer. I made a web kiosk with only mozilla. It took a few tries, as people would fight tooth and nail to not use mozilla. The point of this, is the average user is brainwashed.
So, money aside, i think the point of this "gift" is to force people, no matter how they will use it, to learn the computer beyond the microsoft microcosm. To learn there IS a world w/o MS, you CAN use mozilla, etc. You are only doing students a diservice by having a computing platform where they dont have to think (since they all "know" how to use it already) and wont know wht to do if presented with anythign outside the teeny scope of that.
Another thing to keep in mind, is that old hardware is staying useable longer and longer. A 1ghz PC will IMHO do everytyhing you could do day to day 10 years from now. You could make all of these dual boot, and do a slow changeover from your current licenses.
I say go for it, change the face of university computing, be a pioneer. This is like a free ride to try something new.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
up to what the structure of the courses at the uni are and what applications are needed for doing the work. if the uni feels there are sufficient alternatives that cost less then it should go for it whilst not fucking over other courses. most people will end up using the uni computers for email and word processing so you will find most people can deal with either windows or opensource products (people can learn cant they?). all that is left is what is used in certain courses for doing programming etc and the software used depends on what is being done in the courses.
my uni has linux, windows and mac. while linux is more prevelent (?) because mostly linux applications are used in the computer courses (although if you use windows at home you will most likely find a windows version to do your work at home while using linux at uni to do work too). the windows and macs at uni are there for whatever courses are more windows orientated and usually macs are used for visual design stuff. so while people might say get rid of everything and go oss you might find it a bit hard not to alienate courses that rely on proprietary software.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
I have used LaTeX and HTML to write papers before too. That doesn't mean that I am not more efficient using MS technology for my classwork... sometimes I need to send a draft copy to a prof, and it is nice that s/he can read the damn thing easily. The idea of switching a school is insane--imagine the Fine Art department's attempts at ditching Photoshop for GIMP (which does not have all the same functionality yet, but I still use it because it is free) or the modern language teachers trying to relearn the keyboard shortcuts as they try to write a paper for publication (last I checked, most 50 year-old non-technical profs would KILL if they had to do things differently).
This CANNOT be a real post, simply because no college president is stupid enough to even think about this. Unless the college only has CS and engineering classes, they need the MS apps just to keep the profs from storming his office in a rage that the "Windows" key is now a Meta key. People do not like to change systems--it is expensive and inefficient, and unless there is a compelling reason to do so, they should not need to move. To say that "we are moving to OSS because it is free" is absurd--software costs are not the biggest number in most computing environments, and in many applications, MS technology is simply better than others. Take the shared calendars in MS Office (for Windows only, dammit! though I guess OS X is getting it soon). That technology is actually good and useful. Sure it may pick up a virus every week, but it has functionality that no other system has.
Now imagine a different scenario. A kid runs XP so he can run his games. He writes a presentation for Powerpoint. He brings it to class and it doesn't work with the system there! While we may hate MS for good reason, it does provide a common system for us to be compatible with. MS is the most used system in the world, and even if they move to OS X, they will still need to use Office just to make sure they can keep up with the students' home gaming boxes. Do not underestimate this--the students will still use their Windoze boxes and will want the damned college computers to work with theirs.
http://www.lycoris.com/ I saw this a little over a month ago. I thought it had great potential and to still leave the user with the "MircoSoft" look and partial feel. Plus the cost was not too high. If you have a decent technical staff behind the systems, then this with the "Desktop/LX InterConnect" would be great for the students. There is also the "Desktop/LX Deluxe" which is a more programming oriented setup is somewhat cool. and the prices don't suck for the inclusion of an office package.
I would mention BeOS in this group but there is a solid office package to work with besides GOBE Productive. But hey if OpenBeOS comes to pass within the next year, that would be a sight.
abstraction is 2 keep the weak from knowing the truth. show your source code && always seek the knowledge within
Heya, can anyone tell my why staroffice runs a background service w/ ~20mb RAM usage from the moment my computer starts up (Win2k)?
I love the conditional freedom argument, the whole basis for the GPL and Linux. "Microsoft sucks, software should be free!!! but like, not actually free, just free in accordance with the terms of the GPL and the philosophy of the FSF".
Thank god for the BSDs.
and your grandfather for having the tenacity to take this to the board of trustees. Microsoft is guilty of violating federal statutes relating to conduct of free trade in capitalist markets. Given these circumstances, it is my view that no public funds derived from government grants or other taxpayer sources, or from private donors should be used to support the extension of Microsoft's criminal activity, especially in academic institutions. As long as alternatives exist it is important to use them to curb continued abuse and proprietary extension by Microsoft. Academics have traditionally paved the way in such anti-monopolist movements and should continue to do so.
This is absolutely a troll, but how the fuck could anyone have trouble using Word? 99% of students only need the damn thing for papers in which all they need to do is be able to change fonts, underline stuff, put stuff in bold, double space etc. Someone who uses openoffice could take a minute to show this idiot how to use his word processor.
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I am right now using WinXP on my laptop (shared with my girlfriend) I have a BeOS machine and Win98 station that I do my gaming and shool work. The school I am attending uses all Sun and SGI machines running Solaris or IRIX for which I connect to with a SUN IPX. I think there should be various groups of systems purchased. Mostly PC's running Lycoris and Solaris but also Apple G4's running OSX. This pulls the strengths to filter into the different majors like Architecture and CivilE but also for the presence of real suitable systems for tasks at had. I would like to say a stray away from Windows would be good only because you may end up using it for a while in your job that you might as well get a breather now.
Data modelling on an o2 with IRIX would be better than on some other systems. I would like to see a dual 1+ ghz Apple system working a render than some PC's.
abstraction is 2 keep the weak from knowing the truth. show your source code && always seek the knowledge within
Well, yes... and no. You're right in that the ten year roll-out program makes it easier to transition. But the original post implicity makes the point that sometimes a university, especially a 7,000 student university (I went to one), has fairly diverse needs. Each department has specialized applications it needs to run. What happens five years from now, when a new analysis package comes out, and the econ department desperately needs to run it, but it's only for Windows, and requires Windows2005? I'm all for adopting Linux and OSS *where appropriate* which is not in a setting that uses specialized software. Academics don't care what OS they run, or what productivity suite they run. They care whether or not they can run the proprietary software that is the current hot shit in their field.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
So an annuity of $800,000 for 10 years using a discount rate of 5% comes to $6,177,387. Add that to the $2.4 million and we get a grand total of $8.57 million in real dollars. I would buy some Xserves with a few Xraids, all airport accessible from the 7,000 iBooks distributed to students upon admission. Where do I apply?
And they are a lot cheaper than proposed. www.edusupport.nl.
They support opensource environments, if needed in combination with Microsoft. The cost they run in yearly is about 4500$ for 100 systems, so with 800.000 a year it will come to (800.000/4500=17700 computers supported).
They also sell computers with 15" flat screen for 800$.
Call them?
I am embarassed to admit this, but...
Once or twice I've been glad that there's a Windows lab in the Engineering Center. Sometimes you just need to run software that won't run with the (BSD) devil.
I'll go sit in the corner and feel shame, now.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
If this alumnus was proposing that the funds were reliant on the College only using Microsoft products, and not to use software from any other source, would you think it sensible or fair? Of course you wouldn't - likewise, any deal that deliberately excludes any player (no matter how reviled) should be politely declined.
Evangelise, Explain, Educate but don't Exclude
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
However much I dislike Microsoft products, "offers" with strings like that attached should always be rejected. It is completely unacceptable and should not even be taken to the board.
TA
Maybe the students would prefer to learn something that's going to give them a broad range of career opportunities, instead of having a degree in a hobby.
Last i heard Wine was eumlating windows quite nicely.
it seems like everyone at slashdot thinks microsoft killed their grandmother, they are just company making computers usable, convenient, etc etc
its great there are free alternatives, maybe people might use them if they like to, maybe they use microsoft products because they know how to use it, trust it etc etc.
i dont want to make a long post, just get over yourselves and spend more time fighting who really killed your grandmother
"...the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students."
Shouldn't the benefit of the students at least be considered?
Most of the university Windows workstations should be re-purposable as Linux boxes. Students will balk, but catch on quickly enough. That's what 19-year olds do today! (Faculty are a different story.) So workstations are a non-issue.
However, if the university's administrative systems (student information system, registrar, financial, etc.) are powered in total or even in part, by Windows, then $2.4 million is chump change.
For even a small institution of 7000 students, $2.4 million wouldn't even come close to covering the switchover costs for just one of those mission-critical admin systems.
Over the last 10 years, most institutions have made the transition from legacy mainframe systems managing these tasks, to systems powered by Windows, Solaris, or some *NIX.
If this university uses Windows for an admin system, the changeover costs would not only include new hardware and OS, but enormous data migration costs.
There are no viable open source alternatives for enterprise academic information systems of any significant scale (and even 7000 students is a significant scale). The only other alternative is to roll-your-own from scratch, which is even more expensive, especially in an ongoing support basis.
Furthermore, if they have to switch from Windows, it would require an new RFP, a lengthy proposal review process, and typically multiple years to implement, test, and roll-out the new non-Windows system. That $2.4 million would be but a fraction of the overall budget.
As your grandfather seems to have mentioned, $2.4 million is not much money on a college level. Research grants alone regularly come in the $100 million order... $2.4 is peanuts. The costs that will be incurred just to make this kind of switch blow that relatively tiny donation out of the water, and, as I think most would agree (especially after reading the wide range of opinions on this in the comments) at a questionable benefit to the students.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Suggest your grandfather do a survey of professor (this is a TEACHING college, right?) Ask them some related questions. For isntance, how many of them use powerpoint to prepare or deliver their lectures. How many of them use Project for scheduling, or Excel for grading. Stuff like that. Get an idea of how dependent your college's operation is on Microsoft products. Then, you can get an idea of how big an operation a changeover might be, and how much resistance there might be to it.
He tells me that an alumnus has agreed to donate $2.4 million initially (and up to $800,000 each succeeding year for 10 years) to the school for computer equipment and staff if the school agrees not to renew any contract and to buy no products or services (either directly or through an intermediary like Gateway) from Microsoft.
.pdf rather than exclusively .doc.
I can't comment on the legality of the gift, tho' I find it suspect. I will say that, I think it's rather confrontational and exclusionary. I would rather see the money spent on getting other platforms on campus: be pro quality, vs anti-MS. That's the way in which MS dies. By direct, unfettered comparison to other OSes.
And I hope you don't have any CS faculty, or any tenured faculty, smitten by MS largesse. Indeed, it's only a very recent occurence that many research funders accept proposals in
I'm told that this isn't the enormous amount of money that it sounds like and that a change-over to non-Microsoft products would be costly.
There are significant hidden costs to microsoft. Specifically in tech support, longer downtimes and maintenance/upgrades. This amount of money will go a much longer way towards non-MS products than it would towards anything MS
I think it'd be great for college students to use computers apart from Microsoft, but I'm told that the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students. Does the Slashdot community have any points that I can give my grandfather to present to the Board next month?"
As much as I am disgusted with MS and the crashingly mediocre products they offer. I would counsel your grandfather to not submit such a proposal to the board but rather re-negotiate the terms with the alumnus donor.
Get other platforms in the door without being specifically exclusionary and MS dies a slow death. If the alumnus is truly interested in helping out the school, rather than simply being provacative, that's the way to go.
Just do what you do best
Arnold "Red" Auerbach.
When I worked for a major New Jersey located Ivy League university's (to be left unnamed) Computer Science department, they received a multi-year grant from Microsoft which consisted of several hundred computers, supplied by Dell, with Windows NT/2000 on them.
The grant was written in such a was as to say that the Windows operating system MUST remain on the machine. If the machine were to be reloaded, it MUST be a Windows operating system. If the systems were found to have another operating system installed, the contract would be in violation and Microsoft would have the ability to take back all of the grant equipment and cancel the grant entirely.
That contract put the fear of god in the entire departmental management. And, as expected, Microsoft did do periodic audits.
Because the University environment (a very unique environment, indeed) lives heavily off of grants, their decisions are swayed yearly by who gives what and how much. For example, the server infrastructure, which was heavily UNIX based for good reason, swayed from DEC Alpha systems to HP-UX to SUN Solaris in a very short span of time. It continues to be SUN based because of the continued grants year-to-year from SUN to maintain their footprint.
Students really do not have choice when it comes down to it (did they ever? C'mon.. students are always treated like second class citizens anyhow!). What the student uses is defined by the University, and, subsequently, the professors teaching the courses. It is the professors who have to adapt to the changing environment defined by the "upper management".
Could an all-non Microsoft environment be done? Sure, anything can be done. Is it cost effective? Probably not (and that pains me) since Microsoft's pockets are much deeper.. They can easily do the 'payoff' since they can shovel more money the way of the University.
This college could be an excellent test bed for what may take many years to happen anywhere else. The college could offer a computing lab where there are empty desks setup with high speed internet connections where they could hook up their laptops. The school would not be buying microsoft products but still provide a means by which it could be used. This would be a gret learning experience for the rest of the world. I hope they go through with it. The school has to take into account what an average computer user is like. They would have to use KDE or gnome and format it in a very windows-like manner to ease transition and use for most users.
If I understand this correctly, then the students are allowed to look at the NT source code. But aren't they now "contaminated" by exposure? They now cannot work on any other project without Microsoft screaming bloody murder about them taking knowledge of their oh-so-important OS with them.
Not licensing any MS products is palinly not an
option, especially in academic/research environments. I myself detest the one MS box I have to run, but I have to run it to do my job because vendors of the equipment I administer only write administrative utilities for MS, and not all of them run well under WINE. There have to be exceptions made, and if the donor realizes this, perhaps you can reach amiddle ground where MS is replaced on the majority of everyday lab desktops, but certain classes that need specialized apps are not left in the lurch.
students who have used nothing but Microsoft products and really have no urge to learn how a UN*X system works will avoid computer laboratories and library systems.
Or they will just be told at computer orientation to choose the "MSWROWM"[1] at the login menu.
[1] Microsoft Windows Rip-Off Window Manager
Will I retire or break 10K?
The obvious immediate advice to your grandfather would be to question the board if the ever continuing and increasing amount of money they spend on mandatory upgrades to the OS of each computer will eventually out way the one time cost of changing over to another less costly OS. The same point goes for office and collaboration software from the software giant - and emphasise the point that if the software and OS's aren't upgraded (ie., expensive upgrades and service contracts renewed), support will be discontinued!
Financial considerations aside, what about the educational value of teaching students that there are other functionally usable software platforms besides MS and Apple? And, does the board really want to have a commercial, monopolistic company dictate how they are allowed to use their computing resources, what software they are allowed to run to accomplish any given task? Also remind them that not only does MS do this at the OS level, but are diligently pushing forward at the harware level with the same idea - that they can dictate what software is "trusted" and allowed to be run on the system. Does the board really want MS to tell them that they can only use MS software when another brand might do the job better and for less?
Just some food for thought about what "higher education" should provide or be subject to... Tell him to tell the board to chew on those ideas!
Are you certain the alum even graduated grammar school? How utterly ridiculous, I bet said "donor" doesn't really have the cash and is MS bashing to save face.
Yeah my school definately used MS for word processing, even my profs used powerpoint for our CS class lectures. I agree that not using MS products AT ALL, especially if the school is already using them is absurd. But for CS course work, it isn't needed. If someone wants to so MS programming after graduation for a job, they can get MSCD certified, or just learn as they go.
Congratulations. In your haste to advocate open source, you have just prevented them from using most of the best software in the world. Well done.
No. Microsoft would be preventing the use of their own software by refusing to license it according to the demands of the market. Only in a very strongly held monopolistic market can the seller set the terms for the sale in contradiction to the demands of the market.
MORTAR COMBAT!
... I would say do not accept it.
I hate MS, I loathe it, I despise it, but it is part of the IT ecosystem, any proficient IT person should have at least a passing knowledge of how MS stuff works because sooner rather than later you will need to integrate a MS machine into your UNIX world, program a product for MS machine, administer a MS machine, work in a MS machine or play in a MS machine.
An educational institution should pursue knowledge, it should not become hostage to the external agendas of its donors (MS or pro OSS alike).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Even with cheap MS licenses an OSS based machine is easier and cheaper to administer.
If you include the prices for common services in the mix (web, mail, disk, printer servers, etc) then the ellusive TCO of ownership becomes a mooth point in favour of open solutions.
Add to that that you are never thretened by the BSA, that you don't need to spend time and $ tracking your licenses and the advantages of OSS are more evident.
And I have not even mentioned that the software costs 0 Vietnamese Dongs, you upgrade it when you need to, and that in many instances your software can be tailored to run in the hardware you currently have and not the other way around.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... I know several people that have.
Normally they require familiarity with Office Automation Suits, or other parlance that makes clear they are computer literate, nowhere is normally there to be seen the name of the beast mentioned.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
anytime a school states they ignore cost, then ask those administrators how they pay the rent, maintenance, and salaries of educators and support staff.
computer science majors must learn to create operating systems, and languages.
with linux, you can teach the inside mechanics of operating systems, and computer languages. with microsoft, you are not allowed.
teaching old dogs new tricks is not easy; untill their personal data is either currupted, stolen, or both.
linux solutions to remote 'treaspassers' is two to three weeks. as for microsoft, we are still waiting.
buget is what school administrators must look at.
given the business model of the cost of using teachers, linux provides greater knowledge transfer in the areas of source code explinations, history of existing options, and future possibilities. microsoft's cost is first its product, there is no argument presented that says $100 for microsoft is cheaper than FREE for linux. As for the reason for the options that microsoft provides, the industry term is 'feature bloat'. microsoft does provide answers to your questions, but at a price and an attidude that no business major should ever consider as constructive. my conclusion is that the greek gods have given microsoft the gift of 'pride'.
the argument of 're-training' is very important. lets face it, the deans secratary with twenty years on the job, and now is just learning microsoft word comfortably is "one tough nut to crack"
where do conserned parents wish their children to be educated? is it at a school were attitudes are the currriculim, or is it at a place were the tools of learning are demonstrated?
consider the argument of bio statistics as applied to human groups. linux users as a group communicate, share, and create solutions that are shaping the world's government's choices. microsoft's attempts have been to introduce users to the concept of 'fear, uncertainy, and doubt'.
Hardware is obsolete after 3-4 years tops. It is not an "investment". Any given organization is continuously and slowly migrating to new hardware; a few do it all in one fell swoop, but most just upgrade a machine here, a machine there.
There's no reason a few of those machines shouldn't be OS X Macs, or Linux boxes. It's not like either has problems working alongside Windows.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The students at this college are going to feel like I did when I went to college. I used Macs all through high school and that is what I learned on for the first time. When I got to college it was a real struggle to just type a paper. But I worked through it and now I'm an unemployed Computer Science major.
I feel like doing this will almost hurt the students for when they get into the real world. They may just be adding a little to the learning curve in whatever they decide to do after college. Doesn't seem to be the best way to prepare someone.
"A great benefit of using open source software in a university environment is that it is very likely that the students will fix existing applications and code new ones if they don't like what is available. Even if you are correct that the available applications are not sufficient, I doubt that it would take long for that to change."
How easy do you think programming is? What percentage of students in a university do you think are able to program? What are the vast majority of students who don't know how to program supposed to do when they need an app that isn't yet available on Linux?
Again this is not a computer lab we're talking about but the entire student body. Only a small number of the students are capable of programming and just because one can code it does not mean one can code well. Also just because an open source program exists that does not mean it is up to par with its proprietary counter parts. Look I've used Linux for years but I still cannot shake the personal feeling that the software is all second-rate bargin stuff that is only used because it is free. If the GPL never existed and someone tried to sell this stuff very few people would buy it and the few apps that would be bought are exceptionally rare pieces of Free Software.
"I think that there may be short term inconveniences but that in the long run the students would benefit, the university would benefit and the computing world in general would benefit."
Are you or are you not on planet Earth? When a business student needs to send a presentation and OpenOffice can't handle the job do you think they're going to wait for the program to be fixed and updated or will they install Windows, Office and move on with their lives? Do you think they'll lose any sleep over choosing to go back to Windows? After they graduate and they have deals with clients who haven't even heard of OpenOffice do you think they're going to try to convince the client to start using this weird open source app?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I recommend that your grandfather tell the unnamed donor to get stuffed.
Why? Hey, I'm as much of a Micro$oft hater as anyone here, but this just seems like the wrong kind of restriction to put on a gift. It's okay to say, "Here's a couple million dollars, but it can only go to buy non-MS equipment." Cool. The restriction is on what that money can go towards. It's no different than saying, "Here's a donation, but you have to use it to build a sports arena."
But this restriction isn't just on the money being donated. It's a restriction on the use of all money, from any source. Is that actually going to benefit the students or the school?
It sounds like the donor's just a whacko with a political agenda. Yeah, it might be a good idea to dump Microsoft. But shouldn't that decision be made on a case-by-case basis taking into account the quality of the product and the benefits to the students? It definitely should not be made on the whim of a donor of an admittedly "not enormous" sum of money.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
These things are no harder under Linux than they are under Windows. If someone doesn't want to know how to install an operating system, they will have trouble installingg either Linux *or* Windows. If they do want to install it, they'll be able to figure it out.
An offer of money is not force.
Without money, if you eat, you must steal, and if you steal, you are likely to get caught, and if you get caught, the government will FORCE you into jail.
Will I retire or break 10K?
but I think SO is a pretty good rip-off of M$ office. And costs nil too
Not exactly nil because 80 percent of home users are still behind dial-up. A CD of OpenOffice.org software (which : SO 6 :: Mozilla : Netscape 7) apparently costs $2.50 shipped in the United States. Though it's not nil, it's still a couple orders of magnitude less than the price per seat of Microsoft Office software.
Will I retire or break 10K?
When I learned to code, I learned C and C++. I was very good at it. I interviewed for a position as a Pascal coder, and stated that I'd never touched the language before. So at interview, I was asked questions on programming methodologies and algorithms, and asked to give answers in pseudocode. I got the job.
Same with Visual Basic. Same with Oracle and MS SQL Server (I learned DBA on MySQL). It's not important what you use to learn, what's important is that you understand what it is you're learning. My personal opinion is that Open Source is better for this, precisely because it is less polished and more hackish.
A University without Microsoft will be no worse off, provided its lecturers are good and its students are smart. Monkeys who study to learn which buttons to press will fail their courses, but given the present and projected saturation of the IT market, they would fail in the marketplace as well. Their mentality has been out-evolved, leaving room for those who share the mindset of the old-school hackers to return.
So this strategy [of copying one's competitor's user interface] got MS on the top, and it can as well work work again.
Though this is legal in the United States as of this writing (Lotus v. Borland), it won't be if Microsoft manages to close the door behind itself. That's a common corporate tactic with respect to copyrights: Disney adapted stories immediately after they had fallen into worldwide PD (Pinocchio, The Jungle Book, etc) and then closed the door behind itself by lobbying for the Bono Act. Likewise, Microsoft could copy user interfaces and then close the door behind itself by lobbying for copyright restrictions on user interfaces.
Will I retire or break 10K?
maybe freddie mercury? or elton john?
lol, same thing with me man, It took my parents a few days actually. My sister wondered where Internet Exploder went, I also pointed her to the G.
They are few, but serious. (I'm expecting this post to be modded down as a Troll, the way three of my other entirely reasonable posts on this thread have been -- though two have since been modded back up -- but maybe someone will read it first.)
Firstly, the obvious big one: they continue to place standards compliance on a pedestal above practicality, so it continues to refuse to render a large volume of web sites. Standardisation is a good thing, but not at the price of getting useful work done.
Secondly, it's terribly vulnerable to crashes. It crashed out on me last week, and the next time I loaded it up, it had lost all of the information in my profile: all of my e-mail, my preferences, my address book, everything. After a couple of hours surfing the web -- during which time I noted that (a) this is hardly an isolated incident, and (b) Mozilla really is a mostly unsupported browser with no real help available if it goes wrong -- I managed to recover the e-mails. Two weeks later, I've given up trying to make it use my old address book file -- which is still there on disk just fine -- and just started a new one and transferred things across the hard way.
Speaking of disks, why do they insist on that damn stupid place to store all your profile stuff? Every other application installed on my system stores its data on my Windows D drive (also to be used for data from Linux apps shortly), so back-ups are as simple as writing the whole D drive out to CD. Can't do that with Moz mail, AFAICS; even the places where it ought to be customisable looking at the UI don't seem to work properly. And don't even think about trying to use Moz on both Windows and Linux on a dual boot machine and share the data, because that's obviously a silly idea.
Oh, and did I mention that the newsreader has no serious filtering capabilities, so the signal-to-noise ratio in some groups that I used to follow is so bad that I gave up?
Those are my four big beefs with Moz as it stands today (latest stable release installed on my PC). Otherwise, I like it a lot. As you say, it is better than IE in many other ways, and as I said, it has a lot of potential. But right now, today, these four problems are crippling. If you were running a business, would you trust your e-mail to a system that has known problems with losing all of the data?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yea. That would make it hard to implement a "no Microsoft" policy. I agree with the underlying theme that getting rid of Microsoft software is a good idea. I don't think the hardline approach is necessary though. It will just happen on it's own using natural market forces.
:)
Of course if a University was looking to pretty much get rid of all their Microsoft anyways they could use that money to bribe the software makers of those few titals that don't work on Linux to port them.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Any donation that restricts what tools the school can offer students is a bad idea. If MS offered a bunch of money to a school (and they probably have) with the condition that no macs can be purchased and no linux boxes are allowed, people would be up in arms. This is no different, and should be avoided such that students who want to use MS products are afforded the opportunity.
Vote for Pedro
I'm pleased to see that, around the same time I wrote the parent post, news hit of the release of Mozilla 1.3, which apparently addresses several of my concerns. Fingers crossed, then...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This editorial [0] by Andrew Grygus might give your grandfather some of the information he needs to convince the board.
[0] http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit029.html
I like the dual boot idea, if you think about it, a person preparing for a job in the real world is going to need to know MS, because thats what many organizations use in the real world....if think only allowing a *nix flavor will take away from the college enrollment.
A college without Microsoft is like a fish without a Bicycle.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.