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
Added to which a good portion of the terms and conditions are possibly void under UK and EU law anyway... But you'd need a specialist solicitor to even begin work this out.
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
Anything with a per machine licence is a headache. Which includes just about all the Microsoft stuff.
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,
Microsoft will only draw attention to cases where people arn't paying "enough".
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
It is also only cost effective if you are starting from scratch, otherwise you'd be paying for whatever you already had twice over...
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
Add to this all the labour associated with installing and configuring the software... Even with third party tools this is a major undertaking on any Windows network, let alone one with "hostile" users.
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
You could double it again, as a change in balance of payments...
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!
-- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763