[ale] Microsoft "Gift" to Alma Mater

[Bob Toxen]

1. I would not mention the "only 5 years support for a version".  Back in
   the Unix days it was a year or so and Red Hat certainly didn't give
   5 years' support to its RH 5,6, or 7 series.

2. I would focus on the "gifts" as having substantial continuing costs
   both in the form of upgrade licensing costs and excess SysAdmin support
   for the anticipated crashes and data corruption and loss of user data.

3. Explain that you would be happy to make a gift of a Linux CD (pick your
   Distribution that will be give continuing support for a while) and that
   that *single CD* can be installed on an unlimited number of systems,
   continuing support is free, and that crashes are extremely rare and that
   the risk of loss of user data (assuming ext3 or ReiserFS) is even rarer.

4. Try to find other alumni to co-sign.

Point out that a gift from such a corrupt company found to be an illegal
monopoly by a Federal judge would be like accepting a gift from the KKK
and is not in the best interest of this fine institution of higher learning.

I was dreading what I might find at my Alma Mater when I visited last summer.
To my delight I found lots of Sun boxes.  Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun, is
a Berkeley alumni.  In fact, he was one of the people I went to when I had
questions.

Bob Toxen
bob at verysecurelinux.com               [Please use for email to me]
http://www.verysecurelinux.com        [Network&Linux/Unix security consulting]
http://www.realworldlinuxsecurity.com [My book:"Real World Linux Security 2/e"]
Quality Linux & UNIX security and SysAdmin & software consulting since 1990.

"Microsoft: Unsafe at any clock speed!"
   -- Bob Toxen 10/03/2002

On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 05:08:13PM -0500, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> I've recently learned that three fellow alumni of my high school
> (www.mccallie.org) who are now Microsoft employees have made a gift of
> MS software to the school.  See
> http://www.mccallie.org/news/summer2003/Summer2003.pdf, page 3 for the
> story.
> 
> I know full well that such "gifts" are somewhat less than that because
> they cost Microsoft nothing (in fact, it seems the only people who lost
> money are the alumni and it went to Microsoft, not the school) and I
> have my suspicions that the actual agreement winds up restricting the
> school's use of the software and may in fact restrict the use of 8any
> other* software.  
> 
> If I do write, I don't want to shovel up a bunch of insinuations and
> FUD.  Rather, I really only want to give them information as a concerned
> alumnus and make the case that this "gift" is nothing of the kind.  I do
> want to work in that the school's "Honor, Truth, Duty" is not in keeping
> with Microsoft's business practices especially as it pertains to this
> gifting program.  I also want to point out that MS is dropping support
> on its desktop OSses after less than five years
> (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1410081,00.asp), setting a
> precedent for all current and future MS products.
> 
> I'd be interested in hearing how some of you would respond.
> 
> By the way, this is where I first encountered computers.  I worked
> extensively on the DG Nova 2 and 3 minicomputers described in the
> article on pp. 1 and 2 and two of the three alumni featured were
> contemporaries and/or friends of mine.  
> 
> - Jeff
> 
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