For years the FOSS camp has taken for granted that one of the reasons that open source / free software technologies will always be superior is because of the price of admission. Microsoft and many others simply charge too much damn money for their development tools. Any of us that have been around the Microsoft camp for long know that programming for ASP.net and SQL Server costs a pretty penny, plus every server that the solution is installed to has to pay for licensing. We usually don’t care about the end server licensing since the customer pays for it, but we do care about how expensive the tools are. This is why most of us are glad to jump at the opportunity to grab a MSDN license, since it is the only way that most of our shops can afford to use these products legally.
But what happens when Microsoft turns around and says, “you know what, fuck FOSS. Let the college kids use all our tools for free, so when they graduate they will be proficient and will pursue Microsoft-centric jobs.”
How the hell do you offset this? If the programmer doesn’t have to spend a penny for the tools to learn, then what is the motivation to spend his time on the FOSS toolset when he damn well knows that on graduation the better paying jobs are going to the Microsoft-centric programmers?
Microsoft did just that. College kids can now use the following free of charge, the only condition is third party verification of the student’s school status:
- Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
- Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
- XNA Game Studio 2.0
- 12-month free membership in the XNA Creators Club
- Expression Studio, which includes Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design and Expression Media
- SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
- Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition
- Sql Server Developer Edition
- Virtual PC 2007
- Visual Basic 2005
- Visual C++ 2005
- Visual C# 2005
- Visual J# 2005
- Visual Web Developer 2005
Oh yes. Can you feel the burn?
0 comments:
Post a Comment