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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?"
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!
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!
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 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!
Apple offers a $50 discount to educators?!?!?!?!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
($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...)
Anyone with a half brain and three weeks to spare should be able to get up to speed in a VS environment. Do really think you learn the ins and outs of VS in a half year college course programming MFC anyway? The college should be teaching principles, not tools. In '94 I took an introductory course in programming, where we used VB. When I look back, we didn't really learn anything valuable about programming that semester, only how to make an app look nice and change colors on the buttons.
The next semester, we had an OO course using C++, which was IDE/compiler neutral, and it was much more useful.
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.
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.
although this comment may seem like flamebait at first to all the bias linux hugging moderators, it most certainly is not.
The above user understands that the Windows OS's are much larger (negative) and more advanced (positive). It is coded by thousands of professionals who are paid very well.
"Superior" isn't far off from what Windows is to Linux. Superior does not necessarily mean "better" (I am superior to my younger sister, for example), it simply means that it is used more in the real world (The OS's, not me vs. my sister) and more practical when it comes to "which one should i learn?".
Now think about it, which OS is used more in the real world? that's right! Windows.
The above post is 'interesting', not flamebait.
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
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.
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.
The extra cost savings over the 10-year period (not renewing/upgrading Windows, Office, no Windows viruses, etc) should also be factored in.
Not only will they have a lower TCO, but they're getting paid $$$ on top if it.
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.
>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.
FYI, Caltech (a very well-known and prestigous school) only has 1000 undergrads.
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.
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
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?)
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. $500K for training and deployment of an opensource office suite.. plus the licensing money they'd save!
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
When I was in school, I did all my English papers in LateX. Probably overkill, but there is nothing like compiling your paper before printing it out!
I dislike Microsoft intensely - I think they are a great negative force in the software industry and have done much to crush innovation in the desktop PC platform.
BUT I think any university that considers taking a grant like this is making a mistake. University policies should be based on intellectual and academic goals, not who has the bucks to buy them off. It is repugnant in the worst way.
Most people go to college to get a degree, to get a career to make a living. That is a real-world answer if you ask a college student. This is the way I felt when I went to school.
During my time in a small school's CompSci program, I was exposed to many different programming environments, including Windows and a very young Linux (at the time).
I think it would have been profoundly wrong to deny myself and my peers (other students) the ability to use M$ 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
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 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.
my point is you have to take the big picture when making a choice.
.DOC files, it's not the main criteria that they be smaller.
There is no objective "best tool" in general, there are a lot of criteria and the "best tool" depends directly on their relative priority.
Using OSS at any cost is akin to using democracy at any cost, that is, the freedom as a software engineer to see the code and have standard tools IS a part of the goal of that sort of attitude.
How fast the process runs, or every little feature are important in niche areas, but in other areas it doesn't matter, just like it doesn't matter if Word dumps out big bloated
So when talking about freedom in a software context there is a goal there to preserve ones flexibility. One can get there by ussing OSS tools, but not by using closed tools.
It's perfectly sensible to consider the criteria of [insert type of freedom here] as weighing more heavily than [insert type of engineering constraint here].
And a good example of where most people make exactly that kind of judgement is prefering messy out of control democracy to clean and orderly totalitarianism. So that's the example I used, although the real issue is a simple matter of the logistics of decision making.
-pyrrho
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 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.