Re: [Fsfe-uk] [ALUG] Microsoft and schools (fwd)

[ian]

On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 15:47, Kevin Donnelly wrote:
> On Friday 05 December 2003 2:27 pm, Tom Coady wrote:
> > http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=uk&q=becta&btnG=Search+News
> 
> Interestingly, none of these reports say what the licenses will actually 
> cost, 
> but major on the "savings" ....

I think this is crucial. Since it says schools will buy software in the
same way as before it could just be some additional discounts for bulk
purchases or bundling additional titles. The two main ways of buying
software are through Academic licensing on individual products eg Office
is about £80 a seat, or Microsoft Schools Agreement which is an annual
payment, covers upgrades for Windows Office, CALS etc and is scaled on
the number of machines. I doubt any agreement will cover OEM Windows so
that will still be around £80 a machine for XP Pro.  Thing is we don't
know the details.

Some interesting comments from Sun in the link below.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39118328,00.htm

I'd say no need to panic. The cost of M$ software to schools is a lot
lower than outside but that doesn't stop schools looking for savings.
Hard pressed schools will still want to avoid cost. There will be more
of this in the future. Do you think M$ would be doing this if it wasn't
feeling the pressure of GNU/Linux OpenOffice.org etc? Office to a school
is about £80. Let's discount it 37% - its still £50+ a seat more
expensive than OO.o. And OEM XP is still going to be £80 more expensive
than GNU/Linux because they can't easily discount OEM licenses just for
education. Then there is non-M$ stuff like Photoshop etc to contend
with. We had a customer yesterday who rang up asking how to get off MS
schools agreement and if we could help them use older machines to run
thin client Linux. I think they have a problem doing this, but one that
will provide more evidence to the Office of Fair Trading that MSSA is
breaking competition law.

Its still about eating the elephant a bite at a time. Occasionally we
might end up having to nibble a bit as the beast thrashes about in
protest, but just keep going.
  
-- 
ian <address@hidden>