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Re: [school-discuss] MS Schools Agreement anti-competitive UK



On Wed, 7 May 2003 04:22, Paul Tietjens wrote:
> If you don't want to license all of your machines, there are many
> options available.  They aren't forcing you into the agreement, so...
> I fail to see how they 'force' you to license all machines.

They don't. But the terms they give you if you do are better, and the 
administration of the licences is much simpler. I don't have a problem 
with the concept of a more comprehensive, simpler licence plan being 
cheaper.

I do have a problem with *any* payment option that effectively involves 
the customer paying *Microsoft* for the right to use *competing* 
software.

Can you imagine the hullaballoo from Microsoft and cronies should Apple 
(for example) start inking similar licence agreements with 
Mac-dominated schools? "Pay for every machine in the school regardless 
of ancestry and we'll knock 40% off your licence fees."

Of course, Apple charge for licences up front, not on the 
pay-per-user-per-cpu-per-session-per-hour plans that Microsoft are so 
fond of, so this will never happen IRL, and what part has Linux in 
this? I'd be happy to offer a 100% discount on software cost to any 
school willing to licence every computer through me, and I can't see a 
school being unhappy to pay that much on top to run someone else's 
software.

As PDAs invade schools and devices like the tablet PCs blur the lines 
between notebook and PDA ever more completely, at what point will a 
super-PDA also have to be paid for under the agreement? Has that 
calculator got a licence? How about the photocopier? As one tagline 
says, "The can is open, the worms are everywhere!"

In Australia, the (State) education departments pay a one-for-all 
licence fee also based on the number of computers, total, not the 
number of Microsoft-running seats.

Some of the worms resulting from this are:

 * the resale value of their computers plummets because they are
   not licenced to run Windows. They are sold unlicenced, and only
   "covered" while they're used as prescribed in the education
   system. From my personal perspective, this is great because it
   makes secondhand computers cheaper, but from the school's
   perspective it's an extra hidden (roughly AUD$50-$70 a box)
   cost.

 * we can't introduce Linux to State schools because it doesn't
   save them any up-front money if they pay the Microsoft Poll
   Tax anyway. The only places we can win are a few server
   applications where the (almost) absence of real maintenance
   costs or ongoing security-and-patch-matrix issues makes
   Linux a very clear winner.

 * children can't take the software they learn with home because
   that isn't covered in the deal.

 * now that this monopoly is in place, it can only be removed en
   bloc, which would mean completely revolutionising every State
   school's software (starting from a closed, proprietary,
   deliberately obfuscated  base) in one hit *and* a single
   company that's large enough to offer that (terrifying) deal
   to every school in a State at once.

 * all of this is fighting uphill against the entrenched empire-
   builders who fear the unknown and don't know very much, topped
   by a career "civil serpent" who has a choice between safely
   maintaining the status quo or sticking his neck on a chopping
   block in the *hope* of obtaining advantages which from his
   perspective are almost 100% intangible and certainly don't
   come handily pre-justified.

How you say, "over a barrel?"

Cheers; Leon