A number of points about the MS Schools deal, (some UK specific):
(i) if your school has 1200 pupils, and you currently have 150 PCs, you'll have to increase that to 250 to meet govt targets for the end of the year. 250*40 = £10,000 per year to take part. £10k also = 25PCs, 15 laptops, or enough to cover the pay increase (over traditional UK 12-14k pa techniciam salaries) and training for a couple of suitably experienced IT professionals to run a IT system of that scale.
(ii) Having MS systems does not make your ICT run smoothly, or any easier to run. Using windows at home in no way equips you to run windows wholescale on a network, let alone all the server-side software. My job takes me into many schools where these assumptions have been made and now regretted. Having a pure MS network also does not absolve the school of the responsiblity for training the ICT support staff and paying them at a suitable level (NHS/local govt equivalent rates are fine).
(iii) There is a world of difference, legally speaking, between being allowed to use software on a single home computer for work related activities (MS view of the situation) and being allowed to use the software on their home computers generally. And are you prepared to lend out the media for the install? Because you are most certainly not entitled to make copies.
(iv) Let's just mention social inclusion. Your average inner-city pupil, if they have a PC at home, is not using MS packages. Not legally at any rate. By showing parents what is available at little or no cost, you are helping them to stay legal, rather than encouraging them to break the law. Linux, KDE 3 (very nice indeed) and StarOffice/OpenOffice. You need more in most lessons?
(v) Last, but not least: schools should be leading pupils and parents, not blindly following them. You should be showing them the future, and MS is *not* it. Ask IBM, ask Sun, ask Oracle. Ask Intel and AMD. 10 years ago, if you were teaching word-processing following prevalent industrial practices, you would have been teaching WordPerfect. Where would have been the relevance of that when your 11 year old finally entered employment at 21?
Please feel free to respond off-list, and if you need help persuading your schools, I'm only to willing to help (it's a large proportion of what I do).
Regards
Chris Puttick
IT Manager
Central Manchester City Learning Centre
+44 (0)161 212 1972/70
-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Hill
To: seul-edu@seul.org
Sent: 22/04/2002 21:46
Subject: Re: Re: [seul-edu] MS targeting schools for software audits...
> > 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.
>
> I understand that it is in Microsoft's interest to ensure licence
compliance,
> and I can't blame them for doing audits - they are, after all, looking
after
> their own business interests. What I can't understand is what sort of
person
> signs agreements that says that every computer *must* have a Microsoft
> licence, even if it doesn't have a Microsoft OS.
In the case of the school that I work for, 99% of computers run
Microsoft software anyway. In that situation, the School Agreement makes
a lot of sense because it means you can use any version of Windows,
Office, Works or Visual Studio, along with Encarta, and includes Client
Access Licenses for most MS servers, for all of your computers, at a far
reduced price (in the UK we've been quoted £40 per computer per annum).
Seeing as Microsoft release new copies of Windows or Office nearly every
year, and upgrading will cost more than £40 in a single year, if you
want to keep up to date it makes sense.
You can also use the School Agreement as a Terminal Services license so
that even older computers can use a Win2K environment, a la K12LTSP.
Of course, the fact that you have to pay for computers whether they use
the agreement or not is very clever, but not really an issue in most
schools - for example, our school has a total of 2 Linux boxen (both
servers) compared to 159 or so Windows. What is quite generous on
Microsoft's part is that staff can also use the software on home
computers at no extra charge, and any new computers do not have to be
paid for until the scheme is renewed.
So that's why the School Agreement makes sense. Schools want Microsoft,
parents and pupils want latest versions. The School Agreement provides
both, but of course at a significantly higher cost than free solutions!
But if the school wants to be able to administer computers without
learning extra skills, wants to use the platform that students use at
home, and needs software like Publisher working 100% perfectly, it's the
only choice at the moment.
This is just my opinion, please don't flame it. I'm just giving the
rationale behind why my school is currently looking for funds for the
School Agreement. I'd like to use Linux / K12LTSP, and I've given it a
test drive, but at the moment it's not an option for wide scale
deployment in our situation.
--
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- found on a park bench
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