[seul-edu] Re: enterprise/school/government-wide agreements

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

On Tuesday 23 April 2002 02:43, Dan Kolb wrote:
> On Monday 22 Apr 2002 19:11 pm, Paul Nelson wrote:
>> The 24 largest school districts in Oregon and Washington are being
>> audited my the Microsoft marketing department for license compliance.
>> Along with the letter from MS came an invitation to lease software from
>> MS as part of a school agreement that requires MS licenses for every
>> Pentium and PPC computer, even those running Linux or Mac OS.

> Who signs such agreements? Surely you should only pay for the number of MS
> licences you use/have? If a company had, say, 200 computers all running
> Linux (no MS software), and Microsoft decided to audit them, there's
> absolutely nothing they could do about said company not paying them any
> money for software.

The deal works like this: Method A is that you can pay $200 a machine for XP, 
for each of your thousand machines, or Method B is that you can pay $30 per 
machine per year, regardless of what it runs. Cost of Method A: $200,000.00; 
cost of Method B: $30,000.00 a year. Well and good, your organisation saves 
$80,000.00 presuming an OS turnover every 4 years, and spreads a $200k lump 
sum out over 4 years.

Comes this petitioner from the Open Source movement, hawking software which 
may not be completely compatible with everything else, definitely doesn't run 
a lot of the educational apps we're used to, and doesn't save us a cent until 
we replace more than half of the machines in the school. Appealing?

Proprietary alternatives have an even harder row to hoe. This is *eactly* the 
sort of arrangement that Microsoft were *convicted* for monopoly in court on 
(over OEM deals), and they're still doing it! But `we're not a monopoly, just 
misunderstood'. )-:

Visit your congressman.

Cheers; Leon