My experience is that the Microsoft licensing for operating systems in
particular is a complete minefield. Even the distributors don't seem to
understand the codes etc. If dealers and distributors find this complex I
should think the majority of end-users have many unintentional infringements
of the licensing rules. Its fairly straightforward with a lot of the
curriculum applications that simply say you have a site licence for this
programme at £x. Its the operating systems that cause the problems. The real
snags are all the different prices of OEM, multiple license packs, the range
of operating systems and a range of rules for upgrades, for servers
concurrent users, client access licences, multiple server licences etc etc.
In fact I should also think that quite a lot of people end up paying more
than they need for a whole host of reasons. From a reseller point of view,
the sooner we have one open source operating system to deal with the better.
Microsoft's reply will be that schools should go for schools' agreement
which costs something like £40 per machine per year but a) some eligible
machines won't run the latest software so schools end up paying for upgrades
they will never do and agreement doesn't cover the basic operating system
because M$ assume every machine bought has one of their operating systems on
it so the SA only covers upgrades. Mind, I can't see that M$ would be stupid
enough to take all schools to task. The backlash in terms of bad publicity
would be the fastest accelerator to Open Source I can imagine. Most schools
don't deliberately pirate software and most seem to be becoming increasingly
fed up with the cost of Microsoft. Take a largish secondary school with 400
machines. They probably pay around £60 per OEM Windows on buying each
machine - more like £100 if its Windows2000 and let's say they have School's
agreement at £40 per machine. That's £24,000 and then £16,000 per year just
for what they can have free using Linux and StarOffice and a few odds and
ends. If they want thin clients using Citrix its another £80-£130 per
machine. If Government targets for pupil computer ratios are to be met, this
has to be replicated all over the country. 4000 secondary schools and that's
£50-60m on M$ agreement alone. Double it for primary and its of the order of
£100m a year in schools alone and that ignores any thin client costs. This
doesn't take into account the savings that would also be made by using thin
clients and the reduction in maintenance and technician support required so
I would say we could at least double the savings on that basis alone. Tell
your local MP that you have a way of saving £100-200m of taxpayers money per
year in schools alone and I should think at least £1 billion nationally in
the public sector if the Government will make a bit of effort to promote
Open Source. Most of this money will be re-used and a lot of it will go on
better support and training locally thus boosting the small business sector,
improving the technological literacy of the nation and strengthening the
economy as a whole rather than increasing our imports bill from the USA.
Write to your MP now and copy it to Estelle Morris at the Department for
Education and Skills!
--
IanL
----- Original Message -----
From: Frank Shute
There's quite an interesting article at Salon about how US schools are being hunted down and fined for using pirated commercial software & how they are reacting:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/10/microsoft_school/index.html
Are UK schools going to be next in the line of fire? I've heard that controlling licences and the paperwork involved is a major time consumer and administrative nightmare for schools. Anybody got any personal experience?
The real shocker was getting fined $50000 for 100 odd illegal copies of MSDOS. I'm sure there are plenty of schools in this country who have many illegal copies of DOS running under Windows without realising it.
Anybody been investigated/fined yet?
--
Frank
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