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?"

Comments

Re:Cost over Students?

[LibertineR]

Believe it or not, in a university setting as well as the industry many of us are employed in, MS products are looked down upon. I know this will be hard for MS apologists to grasp.

Yup.

That is why Microsoft is flat broke, and soon to go out of business.

Idiot.

Re:option 3

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Thank you for taking the trouble to support your point of view with sensible arguments; it makes a refreshing change around here. :-)

I hope you won't mind if I now attempt to blow them away with a BFG-9000, though... ;-)

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.

I have just two simple points to make here.

1. The original post appeared to be talking about a whole college, not just a CS department. The availability or otherwise of source code is irrelevant to most people in such an establishment.
2. However useful studying the source code may be for a relatively small subset of the student population (CS majors, maybe some other science types with a side interest in programming), it is absolutely guaranteed that lack of familiarity with industry standard office software (which means Windows, Word and probably Excel) is going to seriously compromise the majority of the students' chances of getting a job.

[...] I do not think that prohibiting the teaching or usage of alternatives should be prohibited [...] Much can be learned from this software so it should not be banned completely.

Indeed.

When I built my new PC at the start of the year, I resolved to avoid Microsoft software as much as possible, because I have issues with the direction they're going in. The only MS software on my machine is a legal copy of WinXP, and the only other proprietary software on it is games. I use Mozilla for Internetty things and OpenOffice for my word processing and spreadsheet. I have been running this way for about three months now.

Based on my experiences so far, I can say without reservation that the current versions of Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Word and Excel are still far superior to their open source/free software counterparts for most practical purposes (i.e., those relevant to anyone other than a geek who dislikes MS). There are just too many useful features that are missing from the latter at the moment, and they have way too many bugs. (That's a whole 'nother debate, but if anyone really wants to know my top 10 pet peeves in either Mozilla or OpenOffice, or why I haven't done anything about them myself, I can post the gory details.)

I continue to use the open source/free software apps because I want to support their efforts and I think they have great potential, but that's a personal and mostly philosophical/ethical decision that I can afford to make. If I were running a business, I would be a 100% MS shop, and I think any educational establishment sending its people out into the business world has to bear this in mind. As you say:

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.

Re:option 2

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

when deciding if you prefer democracy to totalitarianism, do you find yourself asking, "well, which is more efficient producer of widgets?"

I'm sorry, but what do democracy and totalitarianism have to do with my post?

Re:Here's a plan that will win.

[electr01nik]

debian would be better...

What next? Driver Ed with Segways instead of cars?

[rendle]

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.

Alumni Madness

[kmages]

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.