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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?"
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.