I Love Microsoft!

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Fri Jan 25 21:34:29 PST 2002


On Fri, 2002-01-25 at 18:09, Jimen Ching wrote:

> 
> Being paranoid as I am, one could easily see how Microsoft could bribe
> professors into forcing students to buy Microsoft products.  I am sure if
> this happened, it must break some kind of law.  If it doesn't, then there
> is something wrong with the higher education system.
> 
> UH is known for taking 'donated' hardware, which forces the students to
> learn a specific vendor's products.  But that is a far cry from forcing
> students to buy such products with out of pocket money.
> 
> What is this course about?  I would bring this issue up in class.  Is the
> bookstore willing to buy the product back?  At least with books, you can
> get some of your money back after the course.
> 
> --jc
> --

This is ICS321.  We are not forced to buy Microsoft software though, we
can get Windows 2000 Pro, MSVS6 and MSSQL 2000 for free from the ICS
department under the MSDNAA license.  Read about it here 
http://www.msdnaa.com

Under the terms of the MSDNAA license, students may use the software as
long as they are a major in the University only for non-commercial and
non-production purposes.  This means that I cannot use Windows and those
dev tools to write commercial OR open source software.

This is unacceptable for me because I want to eventually work on the
Mono project and distribute some compiled open source software (Cygwin
stuff), so I was prepared to buy the Windows XP Pro upgrade for $200.

I own two licenses of Windows 2000, so I tried to install it on another
partition on the laptop.  For some reason the Windows 2000 Installer
crashes every time, so I have to stick with Windows XP.

Fortunately, the instructor plans to move to Oracle next semester, a bit
better than Microsoft.

This semester I hope that we can convince him to use MySQL/Apache/PHP
instead for his future classes, because that package can be given to all
students for free and legally.



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