Big Company on Campus

Daniel Dvorkin writes "MSNBC (oh, the irony) is running a scary article entitled Microsoft's big role on campus, detailing how Microsoft is working its way into academic computer science through a combination of bribery and propaganda. The aricle may be overstating the case, but it does make it sound as though MS products are displacing others at a disturbing rate in computer science departments. Given that academic computing has traditionally been both the source of and the stronghold for innovative software, this is a disturbing long-term trend."

Comments

Business should not be allowed...

[mao che minh]

..to intrude heavily into an academic environment. I understand that it would silly not to allow some influencing, and let companies spread around a little bit of free "hits", but academic officials should take it upon themselves to prevent any given company the ability to guide the education and goals of their students. This isn't a free iMac in a classroom or two, this is the potential future of computer science in the United States being misdirected by a party that is guilty of monopoly practices, and practices the closed source model (obvioulsy not as healthy to development and learning as is Open SOurce).

It is unethical on so many levels.

Why are people surprised?

[deanj]

Why are people surprised by this? Microsoft has been doing this for years now, and even as part of a recent settlement in a court case. "No monopoly....ok! Sure! ...and as a settlement, we'll let you have all this free software!"

The scary thing is, some kids are now being taught things like PowerPoint in middle school....

Re:Huh?

[garcia]

not only that, but with the current ecnonomic situation affecting higher education (especially here in the State of MN) if someone wants to give the institutions money SO BE IT.

That's less money the students have to pay, that's less they have to pay back later, and that's more excellent programs and hardware they have to work with.

Re:In Other News

[Gherald]

It was a Washington Post article, MSNBC just published it for them.

A common practice in the journalism industry.

Re:wow

[hazem]

In many schools, profs are expected to get donations and research grants - I think the normal rate is 3x their salary. Oh, and they're supposed to publish frequently (publish or perish). And, I suppose if they have time after all that, they might get around to teaching.

A nice $150,000 donation pretty much takes care of a year's grant/donation hunting. I'll bet MS would even though in a new t-shirt for the ride home.

Re:Huh?

[phurley]

I don't disagree - but I have some followups:

1. Many of the people doing open source work started (and continue) because of their exposure to open source, GNU, etc. Which will be limited if the initial exposure is completely proprietary.
   
   
2. None CS students will be exposed only to MS solutions and when they enter the business world (as our wonderful managers) they will request/require solutions based upon what they already know.
   
   
3. Many venues of higher education are not much more than glorified business schools and their graduates are not getting a good foundation in concepts, but rather are becoming trades(wo)men. And they will be pounding with the only hammer they know.
   

Microsoft is well aware that controlling education (especially higher eduation) will give the a huge leg up in the future. I'm not sure that if I were in charge of a CS dept. and was offered a large grant even knowing all this I would turn it down, but there is a downside.

Shame

[dachshund]

It's a shame. As much as people like to point out that CS is about "concepts, not specific implementations", it is easier to learn those concepts using certain implementations. More of the inner workings are accessable in *nixes than they are in Windows, and the development tools are often a lot more flexible (once you learn them.) On top of that, it just feels cooler to realize you've got the proverbial hood open and are touching the actual guts of the OS, rather than (by necessity) playing around with simulations in Windows.

For instance, I never would have understood Operating Systems as well if we hadn't been using *nix systems; it made the difference between actually writing real code for class assignments and "pretending" to write code.

The next year after I finished my basic classes, the department began a transition from Linux/BSD/GCC to Windows/Java. Tutoring those kids, I noticed that they were having a hard time, and displayed a lot less interest. There's just something compelling about doing "real stuff" at a low-level, as opposed to working in a much higher-level environment.

Be consistent

[tmark]

What's the big deal. If people learn how to use Word, or Excel, or VisualBlahBlah, they've still learned how to use computer software, or they've learned how to program in at least one environment, and this learning should transfer to some other environment. At least, that's what OSS advocates are always saying when asked about students are being done a disservice by training them on, say, OpenOffice instead of Word, even when Word is dominant in the workplace. Does teaching students Word mean it would be harder for them to use an alternative later ? If so, one could well argue we should ONLY EVER teach students Word because presumably teaching them something else would make it harder for them to use the standard Word.

Taken to an extreme, one could argue about whether or not students ought to be taught on OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, or Debian/RedHat/Mandrake - after all, they're all different to some extent. The question is, how much difference makes a material difference to the student ?

When someone makes a convincing argument that teaching kids on Windows software hurts them, that's when I'll kiss away the subsidies and grants that MS is giving away by the bushel.

In a perfect world

[mao che minh]

your post would be sensible and correct. However, we live in a capatilist world. If Microsoft is allowed to influence budding young minds to use their products, develop for their products, and learn their proprietary languages, then they will succeed at the expense of their competitors (and education in general).

Dictators do similar things to the minds of the youth.

Re:In a perfect world

[Trelane]

Nothing is stopping Microsoft's competitors from doing the same. Nothing is stopping the schools from accepting Microsoft's offers.

Actually, there is. You have to have marketshare to get money, and you have to have money to give away money. Most of the tech sector is in no condition to be throwing around money on things they won't see returns for in the near future, since they would likely not have a future! The only one really making enough money to do this is Microsoft, and Microsoft monopoly and continued monopolization of old and new markets via means such as this is what's keeping competitors from doing the same.

Hmm. Now that I think about it, the Linux ones do. You can get Red Hat or SuSE or Mandrake or OpenBSD or NetBSD for free. Look at it as a campus licensing agreement that people don't seem to know or care about.

As a case in point, I've offered several times to give out copies of Linux to the bookstore for people to get. No go. They don't even want to get the free CDs to give out.

So, yes. Microsoft's monopoly is what is keeping competitors back.

Um, not exactly.

[jdreed1024]

The "William H. Gates" building at MIT, part of their new computer science complex, was paid for by a certain individual whose name appears on the building.

Nope. He paid for a part of the building. The building in question is the Stata Center, named for Ray and Maria Stata. Ray Stata is an MIT alum who founded Analog Devices, and he's the one shelling out much of the dough. Gates only paid for one tower of the building (cheapskate), so that's all he gets. No one calls it the Gates building - it's called the Stata Center. Or, alternatively "that pile of iron on Vassar street", since it's designed by "renowned" "architect" Fran Gehry, which means it looks like it was a very nice building that got hit by an earthquake...

Re:Huh?

[jared_hanson]

You make a good point, and there are days that I agree with you. However, I often think that perhaps the reason Linux code tends to be more reliable that Windows code is that you weed out all the coders dependent on the graphical IDE.

I've done countless things in Visual Studio where I had no idea all the compiler switches that were being used. In some cases, this created some problems.

In Linux however, I am forced to read all about the switches to get things done. When I need to do something, I read the man page to find the switch I need. I also tend to read about at least 5 other switches in the process. I know what's going on when I compile with gcc, but I'm not real sure about Visual Studio.

How much is Microsoft really giving?

[cookie_cutter]

Each year, Microsoft gives away about $100 million of that to universities

How much of that $100 million is in the form of MS software, which is free for Microsoft to give away?

Ethics are ethics

[IthnkImParanoid]

Accepting a "donation" in exchange for using Windows is a conflict of interest. The job of the faculty and administration is to choose the best educational tools. You are right that good progamming principles are platform/OS independent, but that does not preclude the possibility that one platform/OS facilitates education better than others. I am not making the case that Windows is an inferior tool here, as it would likely be a long and controversial argument; however, I will say that accepting money in this way prevents the school from deciding which is the best choice.

Re:In perspective

[HiThere]

It's not shocking. But it's rather like the Pepsi machine in the room where they teach nutrition.

Sad.

Re:Huh?

[Qzukk]

Computer Science isnt "how to use your computer". The concepts and techniques you learn are beyond any operating system.

Right. So Mr. Windows-Schooled sits down at his brand new job at Unixwerks, and goes to open up Visual C++, and... err... well... opens up pico and flounders around looking for the button to press to bring up the dialog editor.

Or more likely, he'll have skipped Unixwerks in the phone book and fired his resume straight off to WindowsRUs.

Personally, I don't care. If microsoft wants to flood the already saturated job market with even more Windows-Only people, it makes it easier for me to sell my Unix programming skills, at least until the Windows-Only people are so numerous that there are no more Unix jobs, everyone's switched to windows shops to take advantage of the dime-a-dozen nature of the programmers.

But, Long term

[big-giant-head]

MS will get the 150K + interest back when the University has to upgrade x1000 pc and servers every 2 years.

You would think University professors would think a bit more about the big picture .....

Never mind I take that back, having known a few, I can see how this might work......

Re:At UW

[HiThere]

Yes, it does matter. And neither C# nor Java is a good choice.

Good choices include:
Smalltalk: Everything is an object
Eiffel: Everything at least pretends to be an object, but overloading is ... strange.
Python: Everything is an object, but it might not look like it. A bit too much magic.
Ruby: I like Ruby. I can't be objective.
Ada95: You need to understand objects to do OO programming in Ada, but if you do you really can
and Lisp: Well, this is mainly here because everyone should be exposed to Lisp, but you can do OO programming in Lisp. Inheritance is quite interesting.

I don't know objective C, it might be a good choice, or maybe not. C++ has too many special cases and complex rules. (Ada is a bit that way, it's a more "advanced" language than most of the others. But at least it's well designed and not full of exceptional cases.)

Another good choice would be C. Plain old vanilla C. (Look at the Gnome project, and see how they did object oriented stuff in C. They seem to have it all.)

The point of a course in computer science is that you are supposed to come out of it understanding how things work. With the *.NET stuff everything is hidden behind various curtains. Bad idea. Perhaps good for development, though I doubt it, but definitely a bad choice for an academic CS program. And Java isn't that much better.

Re:Good for us all

[RLW]

You're right, that's not the case. The *point* is a homogenous environment limits the variety of systems to which students may experience. The very best developers are those which have worked on a variety of systems. This allows them to think in more abstract terms and not just in the solution space of a single system. Both adaptive-ness and creativity are enhance by knowledge of many systems and languages too. If M$aFT gets it's way we'll all be limited to C#.NET and some blue screening version of windows forever. yick. it's enough to make one want to go Amish.

Haha.. you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders.
The most famous is: Never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Only slightly less well know is this: Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!
- Vezzini

Scary Statistics

[brandido]

I think the scariest statistic from the article is:

Microsoft's total research and development budget -- $4.7 billion in 2003, $4.3 billion in 2002 and $4.4 billion in 2001 -- is estimated to be more than all the rest of the software industry spends together. Each year, Microsoft gives away about $100 million of that to universities.

In comparison, according to the National Science Foundation, computer science department expenditures at all universities and colleges from all sources for 2001 was less than $1 billion.

Basically, 10 percent of all computer science department expenditures at all universities and colleges from all sources for 2001 was funded by Microsoft. This is corporate sponsorship, and, presumably, influence on a major scale that is shocking. I don't see how this could be over-stated enough.