Let me start by saying I've used many an OS and much software (even written some) and I'm not too zealous about any of it, these are just my observations. Also, the views expressed in this post are not the views of my employers or colleagues, they are my thoughts only.
I teach cs at a high school in one of the districts mentioned in the article. I've read the internal emails about the pending audits. First, let me say I'm too busy teaching to worry too much about this at our school, especially because I doubt it will be a big problem at our school because our sysadmin is on top of things and saw or heard this coming as early as this fall. We have site licenses for much of our MS software anyhow.
The district is another matter. Our school's network is Win2k and locked down to students (read: difficult for them to install warez on) but the rest of the district is full of iMacs and older Macintoshes. I've used Macintoshes and they've got their place, but they're not the most secure multiuser machines running anything pre-OSX. This is just to give some evidence of why I agree with what a few posters have already said: doing this audit is almost impossible given the current state of these school districts (read: many random computers, not much dinero)
Finally, and most importantly, in a more fair world we should get a deal from MS on their software because we're teaching it to a captive audience during their formative years. Any potential pirated copies of software are being used to introduce kids to MS software which they will then seek out through their college careers and after. We assign kids PPT presentations and teach VisualBasic in our first two programming courses (before you go crazy on me, we also teach Java, Unix/Linux and a higher level cs course where kids code in C++, and hopefully a bit of Scheme next year).
Do you recall the controversy a few years ago when people found out Microsoft was paying college profs to push MS products. Seems the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the other direction (picture that bowling ball on the string trick that everyone from Feynman to Bill Nye has done and imagine the ball swinging back and cracking the demonstrator in the chops)
Ultimately, will our school transition to linux on the desktop? IMHO, probably not without a very serious nudge; more serious even than this possible audit.
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Let me start by saying I've used many an OS and much software (even written some) and I'm not too zealous about any of it, these are just my observations. Also, the views expressed in this post are not the views of my employers or colleagues, they are my thoughts only.
I teach cs at a high school in one of the districts mentioned in the article. I've read the internal emails about the pending audits. First, let me say I'm too busy teaching to worry too much about this at our school, especially because I doubt it will be a big problem at our school because our sysadmin is on top of things and saw or heard this coming as early as this fall. We have site licenses for much of our MS software anyhow.
The district is another matter. Our school's network is Win2k and locked down to students (read: difficult for them to install warez on) but the rest of the district is full of iMacs and older Macintoshes. I've used Macintoshes and they've got their place, but they're not the most secure multiuser machines running anything pre-OSX. This is just to give some evidence of why I agree with what a few posters have already said: doing this audit is almost impossible given the current state of these school districts (read: many random computers, not much dinero)
Finally, and most importantly, in a more fair world we should get a deal from MS on their software because we're teaching it to a captive audience during their formative years. Any potential pirated copies of software are being used to introduce kids to MS software which they will then seek out through their college careers and after. We assign kids PPT presentations and teach VisualBasic in our first two programming courses (before you go crazy on me, we also teach Java, Unix/Linux and a higher level cs course where kids code in C++, and hopefully a bit of Scheme next year).
Do you recall the controversy a few years ago when people found out Microsoft was paying college profs to push MS products. Seems the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the other direction (picture that bowling ball on the string trick that everyone from Feynman to Bill Nye has done and imagine the ball swinging back and cracking the demonstrator in the chops)
Ultimately, will our school transition to linux on the desktop? IMHO, probably not without a very serious nudge; more serious even than this possible audit.