[luau] Microsoft v. Northwest Schools

[Joel]

For those who don't read slashdot:

About three weeks ago (21Apr), there was an article in The Oregonian (a 
Portland, OR newspaper), about Microsoft pressuring 24 school districts in 
the northwest to agree to their Microsoft School Agreement licensing scheme 
or undergo an audit in 60 days. Multnomah ESD, which covers the greater 
Portland area and has around 25,000 computers, had to either decide to accept 
the license at about $500,000 or undergo the audit which it does not have 
time to prepare for.

The original article:
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/steve_duin/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/all_wire_stories/101386428029222529.xml

The slashdot discussion: 
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/22/1719218&mode=thread


Today, there was a followup article on slashdot.

Apparently, the switchboard of the Portland school system was jammed for two 
days with calls from Linux users from all over the west coast volunteering to 
come help with software migration. Microsoft was hit with angry phone calls 
from all over the place. 

Also, there was an Association for Computer Professionals in Education 
conference held later that week (24-26 Apr). At the conference, Microsoft's 
representatives were doing some serious damage control, "Our two words for 
today are friendly and flexible."  It didn't help much . A couple of guys 
from Simple End-User Linux/Education were at the conference to give a 
presentation about Linux and GPL software, and spent all of their Q&A time 
answering questions about migration to Linux. 

The article:
http://www.seul.org/edu/acpe2002.html

The slashdot discussion:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/10/1752243&mode=thread&tid=146

--Joel