The [Portland] Oregonian

Steve Duin

Microsoft puts the squeeze on NW schools

04/21/02

P redatory? Monopolistic? Customer-unfriendly? Microsoft?

Say it ain't, Joe . . . and Steve and John and Scott and the rest of the
computer tech supervisors at the 24 largest school districts in Oregon
and Washington.

At the busiest time of the year for those districts, Microsoft is
demanding that they conduct an internal software audit to "certify
licensing compliance." In a March letter, the software giant gave
Portland Public Schools 60 days to inventory its 25,000 computers.

"Which," said Scott Robinson, the district's chief technology officer,
"is a virtual impossibility."

Microsoft is well within its rights to call for an audit. Everyone says
so. Everyone has read the contract. But school officials in both states
are calling the audits "untimely," "outrageous" and "typical of
Microsoft: not very bright."

Many also consider the audit requirement a strong-arm tactic to push
school districts into Microsoft's costly system-wide licensing
agreements.

"Given the fact that the letter came from their marketing department, and
included a brochure about their school licensing agreement, this didn't
seem terribly subtle to any of us," said Steve Carlson, associate
superintendent for information and technology for Beaverton schools.

"I have a more simplistic view," said John Rowlands, director of
information services for the Seattle School District: "They just want to
squeeze every nickel out of us they can."

For sheer irony, it's hard to beat the fact that the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation is pouring millions of dollars into small, high-tech
high schools even as Microsoft is looking for loose change at schools
such as Jefferson and Marshall.

The school districts are considered guilty of software piracy until they
can prove they're in licensing compliance. If the district can't drum up
the staff to manage the inventory, Microsoft is willing to show up with
its own audit crew, but if a single computer is found with illegal or
undocumented software, the district must pay for the audit.

"This doesn't recognize any of the complexities of the educational
environment," Robinson said. Many of the 25,000 computers in Portland
schools were donated and arrive without pedigree or papers. "We're
bubblegum and baling wire in terms of what we're putting on the desktops.
For us to try to manage every donated desktop that comes in from a
business or an individual is ridiculous."

Ah, but wait. Microsoft has an offer it thinks you can't refuse, if only
to avoid the audit: the vaunted Microsoft School Agreement. Under the
terms of this agreement, a school or district simply counts its computers
and pays Microsoft somewhere in the neighborhood of $42 per machine for
one systemwide annual license.

As Rowlands noted, IBM rolled out this idea years ago. Schools liked it
because they could add hundreds of computers over the course of the
school year and not pay for the additional software licenses until the
next computer count.

But Microsoft has put a new spin on the agreement, requiring an
"institution-wide commitment." That means the district must include in
its count not only the PCs, but all the iMacs and Power Macs that might
conceivably use Windows software.

What would it cost Portland Public Schools, which is already facing a $36
million shortfall, to sign that Microsoft School Agreement?

"A rough number? $500,000," Robinson said, "which translates, roughly,
into 10 teaching positions."

No one at Microsoft -- and I dialed three different offices -- returned
phone calls Friday to explain why the "random" audits targeted the nine
largest school districts in Oregon and the 15 largest in Washington. Nor
was anyone available to explain why Microsoft failed to notify the two
groups chartered to represent the schools in licensing negotiations, the
Oregon Educational Technology Consortium and the Washington School
Information Processing Cooperative.

"Everyone has a bad taste about the way this came down," Carlson said.
"The audit is heavy handed; its non-participatory. Either they're
starting out with the assumption that we're all crooks or they feel they
can bludgeon school districts into their marketing agreement. It's clear
they're not spending much time talking to the schools they're purporting
to be supportive of."

Thus, it's not surprising that several schools are asking, along with
Robinson in Portland, "whether we want to continue with the Microsoft
platform."

One of the options is Linux, open-source software schools can run on
their desktops free of charge and without a license. Linux is
particularly useful on donated computers that aren't worth the $100
Microsoft charges for a software license.

Paul Nelson, a teacher at Riverdale, and Eric Harrison with Multnomah ESD
have developed a thin-client software called K12LTSP that runs Linux. In
the last nine months, they've distributed the software to 5,000 schools.

"Schools and government agencies that are paying for Microsoft Office are
wasting money," Nelson said. "They should be using free software. A lot
of this stuff has become generic. It doesn't take a fancy program to make
something bold."

R. Thor Prichard, the executive director at the Oregon Educational
Technology Consortium, observed, "Microsoft has made it known they're
concerned about Linux invading their territory. They're doing a lot of
strategy building about eliminating Linux as a threat. Some of the
districts they targeted are some of the districts doing initiatives in
Linux."

Subtle? Artful? Benevolent? Microsoft? That'll be the day.

Reach Steve  Duin at
503-221-8597,

[log in to unmask]
or
1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland OR 97201.


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