For goodness sakes:
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/01/11/microsoft_schools_mou/
The Department for Education reckons it has saved £10 million over the next three years with a new deal with Microsoft.
Some interesting stuff in that article, and equally so in the comments which follow.
Perhaps I've read it wrong, but it looks as previous agreements allowed MS to penalise users (presumably through higher licensing costs) who also used non-MS software.
Educational institutions allowed MS to dictate to them what, if any, non-MS software they could use if they wished to retain their discounts? I honestly find that quite incredible - as I said, I must have misunderstood that.
From the article:
Schools can continue to buy new or upgrade Microsoft licences, there is no obligation to buy stuff from the Redmond software giant though, and under the terms of the deal they will not be penalised for using an alternative.
One of the "commentards" ("HollyHopDrive") offered a quick back-of-the-envelope type calculation, based on the number of schools involved over the three year period - reckoned they'd save £165.85 per year.
Maybe not such a spectacular saving, but another great step forward for a large corporation seeking to lock its users in?
The reason I'm sceptical of the real value of the "concession" (still makes my blood boil if I've understood it right) in "allowing" the use of other software is that it is highly unlikely that most schools will even think about such alternatives.
Rather shockingly, a number of commentards refer to the fact that a large percentage of existing educational software depends upon MS Windows. The only way to break this particular dependency would probably be to outlaw the use of proprietary software in schools altogether.
And I can really see that happening.
It would be interesting to see just how quickly the open-source community came up with competent alternatives if the demand existed, though. I suspect it would be pretty quick.
Must say, I find the argument that "Microsoft is the industry standard and children should therefore be taught to use it" less than compelling - they should surely be taught to use software - how hard would it be to learn MS Word if you're a competent user of Writer, for instance?
A couple of suggestions I liked, though. One was that MS should actually pay (say £100) for each of its licences used in schools - since it benefits in the long term from "hooking" its users.
Another was that parents whose children needed MS products to do their homework should insist upon the school concerned providing those products and the associated hardware if they continued to insist on their use.
Personally, I like the idea of all educational institutions, at least up to secondary level, using only open-source software.
Folk then wanting training to use proprietary software (as opposed to sitting down and figuring it out for themselves) would be expected to pay substantial sums of money for the software and for the relevant courses, and to serve some sort of apprenticeship in an office offering no choices and no alternative means of performing daily chores.
Might as well get used to the idea, after all.
