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
