Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft to Give Away Developer Tools to Students
beuges writes "The Associated Press is reporting that Microsoft will make full versions of their development tools available to students.
"The Redmond-based software maker said late Monday it will let students download Visual Studio Professional Edition, a software development environment; Expression Studio, which includes graphic design and Web site and hybrid Web-desktop programming tools; and XNA Game Studio 2.0, a video game development program. Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites.
But Gates said giving away Microsoft software isn't intended to turn students against open source software entirely. Rather, he hopes it will just add one more tool to their belt.""
From the downloads page "Now remember these are professional tools. This means they are pretty big files so make sure you have the bandwidth and space to bring them to your machine."
That kind of cracked me up. Remember kids, professional tools take up lots of storage space. If it's not big, it's not 'professional'.
Also - this is not open to any student in the countries listed. There is a list of about 42 schools in the US that are plugged into their student verification system. In Belgium it is 2 schools, China 3 schools, etc.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
But I don't quite agree with Gates here. Gates said students will want to try Microsoft's tools
... because they're more powerful than the open-source combination of Linux-based operating systems, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language used to make complex Web sites. False. This is an opinion. It may be true for some cases but it is ignorance to say that any aspect of coding has a magic bullet. Even XML has it's trade offs. To say this only expresses ignorance or a poor attempt at brainwashing/marketing.So this is all around good. I like it even though it's not open source, I think it will overall help Microsoft but may also clarify student's understandings of when to use what tools. I think the next step is for Microsoft to make another license that says you can use it for personal use but once you use it to make money (commercial) you need a commercial license. I don't find anything wrong with that business model. One step further and it could be released under a pseudo MSPL license and another step in the distant future might also entail an even more open state for their development tools. Who knows? All I know is that although this isn't perfect, it's a move in the right direction.
What would really be juicy for me to hear is what Ballmer's take is on this move. I think Gates is generally moving in the right direction but I get this sense that Steve Ballmer is pure evil. Is he seething over this move which to him might just look like lost revenue? Is he even pretending to see this the same way Gates does or is he still in the blind rage "I will f*cking kill ____" mode? I think there are rough times ahead when Gates leaves the scene altogether and I think we will see Ballmer say some pretty stupid things directly contradicting Gates' "just another tool for their belt" view on this.
My work here is dung.
Actually, they do for academic research purposes.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/WindowsAcademic.mspx, namely the kernel.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/researchkernel.mspx
Help me out here, I have a Pentium III 877Mhz processor machine with about a half gig of DDR ram that I purchased in 2000. It still runs fine. For some reason when I install Visual Studio on the Win XP partition, it does not work so well. As in, it is barely usable for small applications and hangs indefinitely for large projects I have. Yet when I write a C++ application in the Linux partition using a number of various open source editors that utilize GCC, it works quite well. I don't mean just VI or Emacs, I mean several things including Gnome and KDE graphical editors (like Glade & KDevelop).
So tell me, what am I doing wrong? Several people have instructed me to buy a new computer but for some reason I do not think that I should have to buy a new computer every time a new version of Visual Studio comes out.
My work here is dung.