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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?"
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.
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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
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.
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"?
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.
why do school kids get their first bit of dope for free?