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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!
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?"
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.
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How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
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.
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).
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!"
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!
Windows and Linux are just different. One is better than the other in different areas. For example, Windows has a great user interface and offers outstanding tools such as Excel, Word, Internet Explorer, etc. On the other hand, Linux has the ability to handle Internet related matter in a flexible way. Linux also allows developers to manipulate the way the operating system functions by simply editing text files. Only offering one operating system to students decreases their ability to learn two great systems. It's no different then capitalism. The success of capitalism is greatly due to the available options the consumer has to choose from. If we want American schools to produce dynamic, experienced graduates who can bring the best solutions to the work place, all mediums of education should be available.
If it was MS, they would be clearly abusing of their power to extend their monopoly, fair enough to contact the US Justice Dept (well, these days it wouldn't work anyway). In the present case, however, someone is donating money to encourage the University to use FREE software, free as in libre, instead of a monopolistic product. You don't see the difference ? Really ?
I just can't believe how some people try to put MS in the same standpoint as free software in these discussions. It is one huge monopolistic megacorporation that they are comparing with a movement fighting for people's freedom in the use of their computers.
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 ;-)
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.
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
3.243F6A8885A308D313
Try explaining to a non-geek how to use basic multimedia, dialup or broadband internet or email in Windows, and you'll very, very quickly reach the same problems.
Windows will never be suitable for the average desktop user, because to install it they have to know about things like partitioning hard disks, and formatting and stuff. It's too hard for the average non-geek to understand how to install Windows. Guess what though? It doesn't matter. Non-geeks *don't* install Windows, just as non-geeks don't install Linux. They use it, and it works. It took my incredibly non-techie mother something like 30 minutes to realise she wasn't using Windows when she came round to my house. Didn't stop her using Galeon though.
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.
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.
It took my incredibly non-techie mother something like 30 minutes to realise she wasn't using Windows.
Do you have a blue desktop picture that says; "Page fault in kernel32.dll"?