Microsoft Attempts to Quash OSS Recommendations

An anonymous reader writes "Inside Higher Ed has a story detailing Microsoft's attempt to alter a report created by the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Gerri Elliott, corporate vice president at Microsoft's Worldwide Public Sector division, complained about recommendations in the report to look into 'open source' and 'open content' at higher education institutions across the country. Elliott, who is on the voting committee, waited until the last minute and tried to have the report changed after a public vote. Although she does have a point that 'open source' is a development model, it still has collaboration at its heart. Can Microsoft argue against 'open' and win?"

Comments

MS up to its dirty tricks again.

[IntelliAdmin]

Before: The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of open-source and open-content projects at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling the open sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Such a portal could stimulate innovation, and serve as the leading resource for teaching and learning. New initiatives such as OpenCourseWare, the Open Learning Initiative, the Sakai Project, and the Google Book project hold out the potential of providing universal access both to general knowledge and to higher education. After: The commission encourages the creation of incentives to promote the development of information-technology-based collaborative tools and capabilities at universities and colleges across the United States, enabling access, interaction, and sharing of educational materials from a variety of institutions, disciplines, and educational perspectives. Both commercial development and new collaborative paradigms such as open source, open content, and open learning will be important in building the next generation learning environments for the knowledge economy. Looks like one member was still not happy with the after and wanted "Open source" removed because of the possibility that it would enter them into a copyright debate.

Windows Admin Tools

Re:MS up to its dirty tricks again.

[ronkronk]

I'm South African, I haven't lived in SA for over 15 years, but I was an IBM mainframe operator there in the 80's and I still visit regularly and have family and friends there. The plus side of the racist white minority rule in SA is that the country got the best infrastructure in Africa, which it still has except that the current government caters to more than a small white minority and thus has other pressing problems as well to deal with.

South Africa is the original home of Mark Shuttleworth and his foundation Ubuntu has an ongoing task in South Africa to teach and install Ubuntu in schools (Hint to Microsoft: It's one fuck of a lot cheaper than a Windows solution). I chat regularly with my mom down there who has a Windows PC. South Africa's biggest problem is a monopoly telecommunication company that refuses to allow competition or lower prices on internet access, thus ensuring some of the highest access prices in the world.

However, if you go accross the border to the north, in Zimbabwe, which is in total financial ruin with an autocratic president who hates whites and the blames everyone but himself for the crap that is going on there, you'll find an infrastructure that was similarly built up by the original white minority government, but one that has almost no new investment since Mugabe came to power ensuring that growth in the IT sector there is non existent.

And that is the case all over Africa, you have some countries which have fairly decent political systems, such as South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, etc and you have others which are either run by despotic tyrants, plagued by tribal warfare or thoroughly corrupt or a mixture of these.

In those countries where there is a semi decent system, the education is usually quite good. In those which are chaotic the people are lucky if they can read or write and those who do know the internet, know it usually from an internet cafe.

Linux has advantages due to its flexibility and low price. Claiming that teaching people Microsoft is better because there are more Microsoft trained people is only true if there really are trained Microsoft people around. Usually, the level of trained Microsoft people doesn't reach the level of even an MCSE, since we all know what an MCSE POS costs, so that advantage is null. Training people from scratch with Linux is in my opinion better since a basic grasp of Linux will enable someone to manage in extremely difficult circumstances where hardware and other constraints would make it extremely difficult to keep a system running with Windows.

Re:Ummmmm

[devjj]

It depends on how you look at it. Microsoft has certainly won countless battles to this point, but one oft-overlooked point these days is that Microsoft is hemorrhaging marketshare basically everywhere. Regardless of how fast it happens (although it is accelerating right now), people are moving away from Windows to Mac OS X and Linux. The interest in OpenOffice exists because people are starting to grow tired of Microsoft Office. Firefox won more than 10% of the internet browser marketshare, and almost all of that came right out of IE's stranglehold. AOL and Yahoo have completely and totally beaten down Windows Messenger. Apple's iTunes - while likely to take a mild hit from URGE - isn't going to lose its majority share any time soon. And let's not forget Google.. does anyone really believe that MSN Search stands any kind of a chance?

This isn't to say that Microsoft is going to lose its majority status where it is in the majority (most places) any time soon, but it's worth noting regardless.

So, has Microsoft conquered? I don't think so. A people are only conquered when there is no hope for their victory, and we are still in the very early stages of what will eventually result in Microsoft being given a more fitting role in the computing community. A role where there are viable options, and true competition. I can't wait.