University wastes millions on software for students

[newbie2]

hey Mark...read this -->

September 26, 2005
University wastes millions on software for students
The University wasted money on Microsoft licensing when it could have supported free and open-source software.

"The New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) is also guilty of wasting money. This development program of the African Union has partnered with Microsoft to purchase hundreds of thousands of licenses of Microsoft products for its eSchools initiative designed to get computers into schools."
http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2005/09/23/65277

[blastus]

The danger with this is that it will open the door for Microsoft products and technologies to saturate the University curriculums. This will ultimately cost students hundreds and hundreds of dollars because they will have to buy these Microsoft products.

I'm glad the University I went to was open source friendly. However, the college I went to before that, well almost every single computing course was Microsoft this, Microsoft that. In almost every course I had to buy another Microsoft product or buy a newer version of a Microsoft product I had already bought before. It cost me a lot of money in Microsoft software. In fact, I cannot remember taking any course where I had to buy a non-Microsoft product; it was all Microsoft.

[bigdufstuff]

The danger with this is that it will open the door for Microsoft products and technologies to saturate the University curriculums. This will ultimately cost students hundreds and hundreds of dollars because they will have to buy these Microsoft products.

I'm glad the University I went to was open source friendly. However, the college I went to before that, well almost every single computing course was Microsoft this, Microsoft that. In almost every course I had to buy another Microsoft product or buy a newer version of a Microsoft product I had already bought before. It cost me a lot of money in Microsoft software. In fact, I cannot remember taking any course where I had to buy a non-Microsoft product; it was all Microsoft.

You weren't able to go to the lab and use the software on the computers there? That is what many people did at my college.

[blastus]

You weren't able to go to the lab and use the software on the computers there? That is what many people did at my college.

For night students like me who worked during the day this was not an option. The labs were also not available that often. Furthermore, the college I went to had extremely old computers and old servers. We couldn't do some of our assignments in an effective manner because their Windows servers were too old, too slow, and would crash if too many people tried to use them (like SQL-Server.)

And when you have like 100 other students before you using the same computer with Visual Studio on it, you can imagine the problems it causes. I'm talking about continual problems like broken software, software not configured properly, etc... There were also students going around trying to salvage other students assignments from these machines. On top of that, if you factor in distractions, my productivity was easily 5 times higher at home than on campus. In short I hardly did much work on the campus computers. It just wasn't practical.

[Goober]

My College is very Open-Source unfriendly. My University had several Linux-only Computer Labs, but the College is all Windows XP, nothing but ******* XP. The Computers are fairly n ice, fairly new, but they are XP, and they always seem to be either crashing, or something going wrong. Which is why all of us have been "reccomended" to buy those little memory Sticks, since their ******* Server cannot be trusted to save our files. *rolls eyes*

So typical. And yes, we are forced to learn the minute details of M$ Office, and spend buckets of money to get the programs to figure out what is going on . . . when OpenOffice is somewhat similar, but free . . . ahh well, tis life, I guess.

[newbie2]

here is an article that is more 'positive' :) -->
http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/05/09/26/2150249.shtml
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/technology.aspx?ID=BD4A94545