It's not "free". The agreements are probably based on LSU's FTE (full time equivalent), which is a formula based on how many students attend. How many students are at LSU? 40k-50k? When you sell 50k copies of Office, you can afford to give it away for a few dollars per copy. It might not come right out of the dept's budget, but i'd bet dollars to donuts that LSU cuts a check to Microsoft for a few hundred grand each year.
We've looked at the MS yearly agreements, but it's always cheaper for us to pay academic retail price, over 3 years, but only pay for the number of licenses we actually use. Academic retail is still insanely cheap compared to consumer retail, and not based on volume. ray On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Christian Tortorich wrote: > Any department at LSU can get a MSDNAA license for $700/year which > includes XP for the labs, all server editions, basically everything but > office (which is free b/c of a university agreement with MSFT). For that > $700 you can also provide the students of any class (not majors) in your > dept with access to whatever you want from MSDN for free. And they don't > have to stop using the software once the class is over. > > MS is heavily entrenched in academia in order to breed the next > generation of MS coders and admins. > > Say what you want about MS, but they provide the software to academia > basically for nothing. > > Chris > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Will Hill > Sent: Monday, February 14, 2005 7:43 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [brlug-general] Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik Responds... > 11/21/04 > > On Monday 14 February 2005 10:26 am, Andrew Baudouin wrote: > > keep your flamethrower in the closet > > There's no need for invective when you have something to share. The > primary > problem, device drivers, is one that's going away and adoption, > especially at > LSU, is up. > > > Szulik: For the average person that > > needs to be able to plug in their digital camera without going into > > the terminal window, we think that the user's experience with any > > brand of Linux will be sub-par. > > He should run Fedora more often. Great plugin camera support has been > working > since core one. I can contrast that and other excellent USB performance > > under debian with buggy and useless performance under Windoze 2000, > where > taking cameras off could cause a system freeze and Palm users got pushed > > around by ineffective corporate "security" measures. Syncing my visor > with > KDE and getting pictures with digikam are point and click operations > that > work out of the box with most modern Linux distros. > > >[Awful educational FUD about W2K costing a University less than a year > of RH > support.] > > What can you do with W2K server by itself that justifies the increased > workload due to viruses and all that? It's my impression that cost of > additional software and runaround are an order of magnitude more > expensive > than the initial purchase. > > LSU's terminals in the Rec Center and Union have gone over to some kind > of > terminal running Firefox on a locked down KDE desktop. I've never seen > any > of them have a problem. Several computer labs have what looks like > Fedora > running, which makes it easy to pull up a Konq session and move around > files > by sftp. > > Students and staff are getting tired of Microsoft's problems. Last > weekend, I > helped a fellow grad student put Fedora on a machine that had a copy of > Win98 > blow up. His room mate's fancy laptop had a copy of XP Pro that was all > > hosed and he was pissed. My rad. therapy professor does all of his > presentations from powerpoint from a laptop that's as buggy as all get > up. > It takes for freaking ever to get up the presentations because power > management is not working for him, and his wifi is looking for the > mother > ship. Then the presentation freezes at random and occasionally the > whole > thing crashes. You can say it works, but my 233 MHz PII laptop does all > of > those things faster, without having to boot and without network > weirdness. > Once these people go free, they won't be going back. > > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > [email protected] > http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net > > > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > [email protected] > http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net > -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ray DeJean http://www.r-a-y.org Systems Engineer Southeastern Louisiana University IBM Certified Specialist AIX Administration, AIX Support =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
