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Microsoft's Software Philanthropy: The Goodwill Ploy
bethanie writes "The New York Times has printed a story concerning Microsoft's plans to 'significantly increase its donation of software to the nation's nonprofit organizations, to a level that may approach $1 billion annually in the next three to four years. ...But the increase has also drawn objections from developers of 'open source' programs (programs for which the source code is freely distributed). Those critics say they believe Microsoft is using a giveaway strategy to undercut the so-called free software movement in the potentially promising nonprofit market.' What do you think? Is it true philanthropy or just another tactic to assimilate everyone into the MS collective?"
Exploiting monopoly is by its nature, illegal. If it could be demonstrated that their pricing is designed to undercut the competition, thats abuse of monopoly power. Microsoft is trying to exploit the LegalCode(tm) bug that a gift can't be selling, and therefore isn't subject to those legal standards. It's just more envelope pushing, and legality is for the courts to decide.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Me start my own Linux distribution, charge $1 billion per CD, "donate" CDs to nonprofit organizations. So me donate several billions and beat Microsoft on top of philanthropic ladder.
lets face it .. the vast majority of these organizations are probably using pirated copies of office .. or whatever else they could not afford .. so if faced with the choice piracy vs. donations i think donations is a pretty good option.
...
the question we should be asking is what is making linux so inacessable to all of the masses that are running a pirated copy of winxp and office xp on their build your own box
What is Microsoft's definition of 'give away'?
Do they mean -
- A charity/NPO can obtain a master CD which they can install on as many PC's as they like, forever more?
- A charity/NPO will be able to download the latest updates, the latest operating system and the latest features at no cost into the forseeable future (say 100 years)?
- A charity/NPO will be granted total exemption from licence tracking and auditing into the forseeable future?
No? Perhaps they mean.
- We will give away our software and do whatever else is necessary, by whatever means, to destroy all current and future competition in the desktop operating system market, and THEN when our monopoly is returned and assured, we will review those charity/NPO software licences and collect our rightful due?
Even free is a bad deal when someone can enforce a EULA at some future date. Under the EULA, Microsoft (and many other software companies) are not selling a product they are granting a licence. A product, once purchased, becomes the property of the purchaser, whereas a licence can be revoked.
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I am the director, and this is my movie
i need to keep 2 dozen PCs at school up to date - they're all donations, they have whatever OS the giver had, I need them all to be on a par so kids can go from one to another without a brain freeze, and though a part of me wishes they'd play fair on a lot of other things, this seems like it's more needed than evil.
apple has been known to give the OS at a significant discount to teachers, i'm surprised they made a stink.
plus how long would i be working there if i told the boss 'we can get this for free, but on principle i'll just run down to staples and pick up 24 of them at the sell thru price...'
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I worked for a non-profit organization once.
For an organization of about 100 (maybe more) people, there was exactly ONE IT admin, plus one intern like myself.
Sad thing is, though, neither MS nor OSS, to me, provides the best solution - because non-profits are usually so cash strapped - which turns to be people-strapped, time-strapped, etc.
I remember back then we tried to set up a whole slew of services (this was before MS BackDoor erm BackOffice) came out - and tried to put almost the entire line of MS servers onto one NT4 machine. needless to say, the thing would crap out just sitting there idle. (and these were donated software. sorry to say but MS has been donating to non-profits for a loooong time, for good or bad)
With that kind of instability (and we can't afford shiny new dells, so we get all the systems either custom build very cheaply, or get donated used ones), MS servers won't do. Maybe now it's better, but with the kind of system requirements, I seriously doubt we can run XP / 2k Servers.
However, i don't really think linux would really do either - because user-support is the rest of the spent time when the IT group (the 1.5 person - one admin and the part-time intern) isn't fiddling with junk. And I just can't see any possibility in training 75 year old gradma's (seriously - some of them really were!) to do any new computing technology within any kind of resonable timeframe. I am sorry to say, guys, KDE and GNOME is not the easiest to figure out, and certainly not the easiest to teach. The UI design does not follow a strict standards across OSS software (okay, to me anyway), so that causes a lot of problems.
I personally think that if Apple gave us a huge slew of over-stocked iMacs, we'd been all set. I think macs tend to last a lot longer than PCs (average life span, anyway - maybe it's due to the higher per-unit cost?), but doesn't degrade into pitifulness nearly as fast; even right now the first-gen iMacs, I think, are still usable. And yes, Macs are more intuitive UI-wise.
But that never happened, so when I left, the lone IT admin was still holding back the fire, in the most endless, swamped way...
Okay, I am sure that was related somehow, though not sure HOW exactly.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
And when BG does it, it's not philanthropic....not by a long shot. It is self-serving...and not in a karmic kind of way, either.
Philanthropy: The practice of helping people in need. Nothing there about it being a business practice!
When there are strings attached (and w/MS there are always strings), it's called 'manipulation'. Some may recall when one of the suggested penalties after MS was convicted, was for them to give away software? Hardly a penalty, and everyone knew that, including MS.
Remember, investing in MS is risking having your own resources used against you.
These guys just can't win. They get slagged off in the media for not contributing to schools (for not allowing the transfer of licenses, not offering free licenses to charities, etc).
Now they give in, do the right thing, and give the stuff away and they get in trouble for that!
If Microsoft stuff is free, and OSS stuff is free, surely the better product will win in that market sector? Sounds to me like OSS supporters are all-too-aware that their software has a way to go before anybody would choose it over Microsoft if it were free (other than the Germans perhaps...)
I agree with the other posters, though -- unless Microsoft tries to use some kind of licensing muscle that tells the nonprofits they can't use free software at the same time, then there's no harm done here. It's just tax write-offs and some good PR for Microsoft.
Breakfast served all day!
A decade or so back, Bill Gates and Microsoft got a lot of flak about being in the newer generation of wealthy that wasn't nearly as philanthropic as the old weathly.
After that, he made statements about shifting his focus to philanthropy after he retired (I think he said at age 50, at the time). Then after he got married, his wife has been extremely active in charitable donation (most notably with grants to urban schools and to youth in third world countries with disease problems).
One of the easiest ways for Microsoft itself to be philanthropic is to donate their products, rather than to donate cash. So it seems to make perfect sense for them, if they are trying to contribute to society in a charitable fashion, to donate their products to nonprofits and other needy organizations.
Yes, they may be helping improve their market share with these donations. But you people can't have your cake and eat it too -- if bitch about them not giving to charity, and then you can't turn around and bitch about them doing it, regardless of how they do it (unless they're giving all their money to the KK or something). This would be like bitching about Ford trying to increase their market share if they donated trucks to organizations that brought meals to the elderly that couldn't get out of the house. This is a totally ridiculous topic, the text describing the article itself is basically flamebait.
I work for one of these non profit (missionary) organizations, and I think I can safely say that if Microsoft didn't do this for us, we wouldn't be able to do much of anything at all.
I'm writing code for a program that is targetted at computer illiterate users, often with machines that were donated to them and these machines are almost exclusively Windows machines.
The simple fact of the matter is, end users who lack technical know-how would be simply throwing their hands up in despair if they had to work on linux machines. And "tech support" is on the other side of the world and would require a satellite phone call.
In many cases, it is an issue of Microsoft donating software that never would have been bought otherwise. But it's not really driving the free software out. The free software was never there to drive out because it was too hard to set up and use.
Every time a story like this comes out, there are always a few morons whining about how we're always critical of Microsoft, and we speak badly of them no matter what they do, blah blah blah. Some of them are even venturing to say that it's because we all know free software is inferior and can't match Microsoft products in quality.
So we don't like poor old Microsoft. No matter what they do, it has an evil motive. Where do you suppose we got that idea? Did we wake up one day and say to ourselves, "Let's find a company and try to make them look as bad as we can. Hmm, Microsoft sounds like a good choice"?
No! The reason we think Microsoft is always planning something evil is because history shows that Microsoft is always planning something evil! Well, that's certainly a funny reason to doubt their motives!
Those of you who keep coming to Microsoft's defense, who keep telling us to leave the innocent, misunderstood corporation alone, do you really think they've never done anything wrong? Do you truly believe in your hearts that Microsoft is doing something like this out of pure generosity?
And to those of you who keep calling it silly for Microsoft to compete with "free" software, what on earth don't you understand about "free speech, not free beer"?
As far as the packaged software is concerned, a copy of Windows (any version) Office (any version) or any other piece of software Microsoft donates to charity, the cost is the raw material involved in the package, and the cost of duplication for the content. Also by donating copies of software packages to charity, they bring down the total cost of production per unit.
Why would this be the case? When other companies donate material to charity, they are donated the cost is figured at the market cost (i.e. the full price that the product sells for). Why would this be any different? If a company donates 100 monitors to schools, the total donation will be the market price of the monitors, even though the market price may be 500 times higher than the actual cost of manufacturing the monitors. Why is it slashdotters only seem to complain about these things when MS does them? If AMD had donated $1,000,000 worth of CPUs, no one would bitch because it really only cost them $1,000 to make the CPUs and the rest is just padding on their bottom line.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
God you're an idiot. Why is it MS always decides to be philanthropic at strategic times in strategic places?
India begins to embrace Linux, MS offers hundreds of millions of dollars in software. Non-profits begin to look at Linux, MS offers hunders of millions of dollars in software. Do you see a trend here? Dumbass.
MS has had 20+ yrs to really help non-profits, but didnt choose to until now. Unless you're from Redmond or stupid, you know why.
Of course the Gates family is well known for their philanthropic gestures, but any time someone is prepared to give away over a BILLION dollars, you have to question their motives
I went about doing half an hour's worth of Googling on unfair trade practices and international product dumping, and came to a conclusion: there is nothing legally wrong with what Microsoft is doing.
Microsoft is merely giving away their product at the same price as the open source people. If I trusted their motives, I would respect the donation, however, I think it is clear to everyone that Microsoft is attempting to attack open source software in one of their most promising markets. Their manner of doing it reaks of unfair trade practices, but for two things:
So, while I find Microsoft's practices mean spirited and anti-competitive, I think they are perfectly legal.
For example, Apple flooded the school systems 15 years ago with pretty good little systems. They were used to teach typing, accounting, and basic computer skills... What did all that effort earn Apple?
It got them a whole hell of a lot... but it's a bit ethereal to put into hard numbers. Ie, you could say the same thing about Java: "What did Java get out of having it being picked up and taught at the university level so heavily?". Well, Java got a ton of kids coming out of school knowing Java is even around. What would Linux get out of having IBM subsidize $2billion in computer purchases for schools as long as they ran Linux?
Back when Apple would heavily subsidize school purchases for Mac's (Apples margins at the time were huge, like 50%+) it at least gave kids the opportunity to use something else besides a PC... and just perhaps decide they grokked it and really wanted one at home. I know for teachers it was a big deal- you can look at a lot of K-12 schools and if they're heavily mac-based, the teachers will often have macs at home. I'd have to imagine Apple would be selling more Macs to households in those schools also, as well I've seen it.
In my own situation, we never had a Mac at home until I really got exposed to them in high school... we had an ancient IBM PC, then a Tandy, then a 386... then I got into Macs by working in the science labs and school newspaper. After that, we ended up just buying Macs at home... for my own personal machines I've spent over $25k+ on Apple hardware, the family computer back at home is an iMac... dad uses an iBook, etc. Without being exposed to them in school, I wouldn't have been exposed period.
I still see a lot of the same, but less now with Apple's hardware as their software... Ie, I'm pseudo-mentoring a high school kid as a favor who is really getting into using OSX at school, whereas at home he's only been exposed to Windows... this week we're going to be messing with Apache on an OSX box at his school to create a rendevous-enabled intranet for the science lab. But it's hard to put into hard numbers. But I know when I see a high school kid using iMovie and Final Cut Pro at the high school level it shapes their opinions of Macs for the future, and their awareness.
Of course the downside is when schools have 15 year old media labs using incredibly ancient MacintoshSE's with 9" black and white screens and THAT is their only real exposure to Macs. 9 times out of 10 when I find a real mac hater they'll say "I hate macs! They're slow, they run in grayscale, i can only use one app well at once" and I know their school had ancient word processing labs and they've never seen something like OSX. Of course when they do, they don't change their opinion about them being slow but it's a start...
AFAIK, MS Select Licensing includes no support. If you want support from Microsoft, it starts at $99/incident for online support, $245/incident for phone support. I think the only way to get free support from them is if you buy retail software.
--the non profits have choices-accept, not accept, or just keep using what they already have perhaps, not get sucked into upgrading cycles. Here on slashdot, you also have a choice, in your user preferences, you can de select the microsoft articles, can't you? If they are burdensome? You can also keep the articles, then go to the link, read the entire article, then skip the commentary where the bashing might be offensive. Lot of choices there.
Now, because this is a forum and anyone may post their views, I would say, yes, microsoft deserves bashing. They have been proven many times to be highly predatory, to use questionable and illegal business tactics, and now, combined with all the other articles, you can plainly see they are afraid of open source and free software. They simply have no way in the future to keep making mega profits unless they maintain their mindshare. Them giving away "free" software that is in essence almost zero cost to them to make copies of, and getting "tax breaks" for that, is yet again another example of a deseperation move on their part, because they can SEE mindshare evaporating on them, daily now. They are big, powerful, so enamored of themselves they border on megalomaina, but buried inside them they are terrorized now. They waited too long. There was just one worm too many, one virus too many, open source and really free software has gotten too good. If I can be punny they lost their "window of opprtunity" for the new century already, they waited just too long. They have few options left, this is one of them. I expect them to be forced into dropping prices across the board soon. You could see this coming 3 years ago clearly. Right now, yes, still a big company, making profits, this is not likely to continue for much longer.
Tell you a story, I owned two different studebakers, when they were still a big company. Times change, don't they?
It may take awhile, but microsoft is on it's way back down to a much smaller and much less important company. All it will take is a few of the top retailers to have already installed linux on machines at the retail level that most people get exposed to, and wham, that's it. Add in some more governments, a few big other corporations. It'll happen.
You don't see many people switching back to microsoft, once they really start using linux, and it used to be macintosh. It just doesn't happen,but you will see people switching away, oine here, one there, a thousand here, ten thousand there. So microsoft has no choice now, like these car companies out there. 0% interest and cash back and all sorts of things they weren't offering just a few years ago. Business changes, times change, reality changes. Microsoft will increasingly just be forced to give it away,give it away, keep sweetning the pot, until they are free as well, if they want to stay in any sort of business, until there's a leveling, then it will be down to the concepts of useability and service versus useability and service. Paid-for software is dying out, and fast, except for custom in house written. The OS in particular.
Now if they were REALLY smart, they could shock the world, change overnight, and give it all away, just offer paid-for service plans at a reasonable rate, with automatic free upgrades. They are so used to making money the easy way, they have no conception of this as a business model, whereas with linux et al it's about the *whole* business model, which is *what most people think it's worth*.
This is just like the music business hanging onto to last centuries business model, doomed to failure unless they change with the times. And the reason WHY is that code or sounds or pictures are so EASILY copied and distributed now, there's no absolute reason to charge these huge amounts of money. You retail based on low volume, high profit, or huge volume, low profit, or service, and THAT'S IT, that's all business can offer..
Microsoft leveraged themselves into a near monopoly, charged a premium, then stopped producing like the
FWIW, I've been working with non-profits, mostly in a technical capacity, for nearly a decade.
I agree with the parent, however, a couple of thoughts:
Some of the largest organizations are non-profits: Hospitals and universities. Not all non-profits are scrabbling for cash. I personally draw a mental distinction between "establishment" non-profits and "scrappy" ones that are membership- or donation-driven. I've worked with the scrappy ones.
I have a full-time job (and consult independently) doing web programming, linux networking and various and sundry linux projects, almost exclusively for non-profits. I don't really have too much trouble getting clients willing to go with OSS (after all, they are interested in results, not the way you get there), but I have heard from some consultancies that the reason they are Microsoft-only for servers and networks is that "Microsoft gives this stuff out for next to nothing to non-profits, so why shouldn't we use it?"
I think it's a shame- small non-profits generally don't have the technical capacity to manage windows servers securely, and the linux boxes and applications I install just run and run. Not that they don't need management, but a couple of minutes a month is usually all that's needed.
Non-profits are full of folks that are willing to "go against the flow" and use OSS, but in some situations I'm definitely seeing folks go with Microsoft just because they're giving their stuff away. If you want to see how cheap, go here.
I'm not attempting to pass judgement on whether such a donation would be good or bad, just asking the question of whether it's legal in light of MS's current conviction.
The reality of software is that you own nothing other than the right to use. Free software you also do not own, however you are free to learn how to copy, change, and publish its functions, sell fair copy of your own software for its OS, if it has value. There is a big difference in philosophy. You can bet there will be no free use of any core developement software given away by Microsoft.
The very last thing on earth that Microsoft wants is people to be hired or learn to write regional appropriate interfaces. The real reason Microsoft is giving the use of its software away to third world countries is that it needs beta testers for language releases. You can bet your bottom dollar that the bug reports, spelling errors, reports of ill conceived interface naming, etc in many languages is one of the biggest benefits Microsoft is looking for in return.
The real threat to Microsoft comes from Unixses in the Orient, and to some extent eastern Europe where Linux and Unix have a big head start, especially in the Universities. Go to just about any eastern University and you will find Unix culture. Microsoft is a late comer to the University culture of the world, it is flexing its North America centric world view with its dollars and is in for a big suprise. The so called third world is not as backward as one here is taught to believe. Most of the best programmers are coming from India and many can C and Assembley code the Dickens out 99% of the info college Dot Net Visual Studio hackers, working in IS the US.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I would like to make a small change, if I may:
Publicly traded Corporations are designed to do one thing, and one thing only: to increase the value of its stock.
There are plenty of privately-held companies that live up to the very human ideals of their much more specific ownership. To them, making a profit (or increasing shareholder value) is important only to the extent that it lets them continue with their philanthropy, business experiment, or just plain screwing around and getting paid.
Aaron Pierce www.aaronpierce.com
So...as soon as Microsoft starts competing at the "no-cost" software level, all the zealots cry fowl.
:)
Typical
Personally, I don't think giving away software should really count as a donation. If they really wanted to be charitable, they'd give out support contracts with the software.
But I don't think that's the game here anyway. I think there are two games being played.
Game one: The tax write-off. Give away a billion dollars of software, reduce your corporate tax liability by 390 million or so.
Game two: The support calls. When the free software breaks, start charging the famous Microsoft $300/incident fees.
why do school kids get their first bit of dope for free?
The way I see it, OSS is making software available for free whether it be directly or indirectly. Whatever Microsoft's motives may be, they'd probably be much less inclined to donate this much software at no cost if OSS hadn't pressured them into doing so. At the end of the day, these organizations are still able to save some money. What's wrong with that? It's not like this is going to make OSS disappear. We'll just have to polish our software up if we want these organizations to use our software in light of other free alternatives.
Who cares if its an attempt to compete against free software? Its a win-win for non-profits and MS, and if free software can't compete purely on features (minus the price advantage), then it should lose. Its the free market at work. Get over it.
What techinical support? I do not even know anybody that ever phoned MS for technical support, yet everybody pays them for it?
I know a company that pays for MS technical support; $30/mo and afaik they can phone up anytime. Most of the time they've done something stupid I guess, because they seem to think they're getting good value for it.
Here's how it worked out when I got involved. The company is fairly small and doesn't do that much on the computer. They have WinXP and use Outlook Express for their mail.
One day they go to start OE and as soon as the program starts they get the "This program died" dialog box. They call Microsoft, who advise them to do various stupid stuff like try the application again, reboot the box, etc. After about 45 minutes the MS tech support people eventually refer them to a knowledgebase article which involves messing with the registry and reinstalling parts of the OS. They get nervous and call me.
So I get the machine. First a virus and AdAware scan of course. They mention their Microsoft contract and previous call. I Start OE, type the error message into google and in 5 seconds I've found the knowledgebase article that took Tech Support 45 minutes to get to.
I followed the instructions provided; "Ask windows to repair itself", "Reinstall the faulty app", and "reinstall most of Windows" (what they call
an in-place upgrade.) None of that made any difference so I hit Google again with the error message and got some more steps to try (See if it's in the config by creating a new user) which also didn't solve the problem. I also asked on several IRC channels and got a few other ideas, but none of those worked either.
Eventually, after about 10 hours of banging my head on the keyboard we backed up the My Documents folder to a CDR and did a CLEAN reinstall of Windows and all the Apps.
If I'd called MS Tech Support, I'm fairly sure that whould have been the next step anyway.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Gates NEVER had the slightest philanthropic impulse until the anti-trust trials brought home the shocking revelation that politics and public image are strategically important when you have mind-bogglingly huge piles of cash lying all around you.
It's the obscenely wealthy man's equivalent of walking around pressing flesh and kissing babies without ever having to actually dirty his hands with "the people".
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.