Redhat tells MS where to to

MiCr0

Red Hat Proposes to Enhance Microsoft Settlement Offer By Providing Open Source Software to All U.S. School Districts

Open Source leader proposes to provide software to every school district in the United States if Microsoft provides computing hardware for the 14,000 poorest school districts

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Nov. 20, 2001—Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT - news) today proposed an alternative to the settlement announced today of the class-action lawsuit against Microsoft. Red Hat offered to provide open-source software to every school district in the United States free of charge, encouraging Microsoft to redirect the money it would have spent on software into purchasing more hardware for the 14,000 poorest school districts. Under the Red Hat proposal, by removing Microsoft's higher-priced software from the settlement equation, Microsoft could provide the school districts with many more computers--greatly extending the benefits Microsoft seeks to provide school districts with their proposed settlement.

Microsoft had proposed that, in settlement of class-action claims of price-gouging, the company donate computer hardware, software and support to 14,000 poor school districts throughout the United States. Under the proposed settlement, a substantial part of the value provided to schools would be in the form of Microsoft software.

The Red Hat's alternative proposal includes the following:

Microsoft redirects the value of their proposed software donation to the purchase of additional hardware for the school districts. This would increase the number of computers available under the original proposal from 200,000 to more than one million, and would increase the number of systems per school from approximately 14 to at least 70.
Red Hat, Inc. will provide free of charge the open-source Red Hat Linux operating system, office applications and associated capabilities to any school system in the United States.
Red Hat will provide online support for the software through the Red Hat Network.
Unlike the Microsoft proposal, which has a five-year time limit at which point schools would have to pay Microsoft to renew their licenses and upgrade the software, the Red Hat proposal has no time limit. Red Hat will provide software upgrades through the Red Hat Network online distribution channel.

A Win-Win Approach
The Red Hat proposal achieves two important goals: improving the quality and accessibility of computing education in the nation's less-privileged schools, and preventing the extension of Microsoft's monopoly to the most-vulnerable users.

"While we applaud Microsoft for raising the idea of helping poorer schools as part of the penalty phase of their conviction for monopolistic practices, we do not think that the remedy should be a mechanism by which Microsoft can further extend its monopoly," said Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat. "Through this proposal all of the states and all of the schools can win, and Microsoft will achieve even greater success for its stated goal of helping schools. By providing schools with a software choice, Red Hat will enable Microsoft to provide many more computers to these schools. At the same time, the schools can accept this offer secure in the knowledge that they have not rewarded a monopolist by extending the monopoly. It's now up to Microsoft to demonstrate that they are truly serious about helping our schools."

General information about Red Hat's support for education is available at www.redhat.com/opensourcenow/.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat is the leader in developing, deploying and managing solutions built on the benefits of an open source platform. The open source platform includes the Red Hat Linux operating system for mainframes, servers, workstations and embedded devices, GNUPro tools for developers, database, e-Commerce, secure web server, high availability server and run-time solutions like eCos and RedBoot. For this platform, Red Hat provides end to end professional services including Professional Consulting, Engineering services, Enterprise Support services, and Global Learning services. Red Hat Network is the premier Internet based service that simplifies and integrates the deployment and management of these offers. More information about Red Hat is available at www.redhat.com. Red Hat is headquartered in Research Triangle Park, N.C.and has offices worldwide. For investor inquiries, contact Gabriel Szulik at Red Hat, 919-547-0012, x439.

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc. All other names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

from
http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2001/press_usschools.html

tHE vAGGABOND

heh - classic...

Somehow I cant see MS jumping at this

Isegrim

cool

a victory for the american schools and a pain in the a*** for mirco$oft

and i do not think that m$ is able to say no to this

isegrim

Static

Of course microsoft will say no. If you get taught computing based on windows, you'll continue to purchase windows. They'll lose out on the money in the long run. I'd say if anything they'd be better off just coughing up money, or reducing the per unit cost of the operating system.

I learned computers in general on windows. Don't get me wrong, I know unix well, I'm an administrator. But I wouldn't use unix for my desktop. It's just too clunky (and I've tried all popular window managers). It's still not smooth and bug-free enough to browse the web. It's technically superior to window IMHO for administration, and running servers, but for desktop use, and word processing/spreadsheets, windows still runs away with it. They'd be much better off with windows.

*awaits flames*

Isegrim

Originally posted by Static
Of course microsoft will say no. If you get taught computing based on windows, you'll continue to purchase windows. They'll lose out on the money in the long run. I'd say if anything they'd be better off just coughing up money, or reducing the per unit cost of the operating system.

I learned computers in general on windows. Don't get me wrong, I know unix well, I'm an administrator. But I wouldn't use unix for my desktop. It's just too clunky (and I've tried all popular window managers). It's still not smooth and bug-free enough to browse the web. It's technically superior to window IMHO for administration, and running servers, but for desktop use, and word processing/spreadsheets, windows still runs away with it. They'd be much better off with windows.

*awaits flames*

you might be right

but ms can just lose on this.
if they say no they will get bad publicity,
if they say yes they will have a whole bunch of new linux users.

as for the desktop thing
i can work very well with KDE2 on mandrake 8.1
(viewing dvd, rendering, writing, coding, mp3, html and all this stuff)
even my usb printer works fine.
i only have some problems with the 3d accelerator
but everything else works fine. :cool:

moist

Originally posted by Static

I learned computers in general on windows. Don't get me wrong, I know unix well, I'm an administrator. But I wouldn't use unix for my desktop. It's just too clunky (and I've tried all popular window managers). It's still not smooth and bug-free enough to browse the web. It's technically superior to window IMHO for administration, and running servers, but for desktop use, and word processing/spreadsheets, windows still runs away with it. They'd be much better off with windows.

Different strokes for different folks.
I use a *NIX desktop exclusivly in work and home for everything except playing games.
Granted my office requirements are rather minimal but staroffice has been able to read any doc or xls
that has wanderd my way, and any that I send to other people are also fine.

As for browsing opera, galeon and konquer serve me quite well, and even recent mozilla
releases aren't to bad, on a beefy machine
IE and especially nutscrape often crash on me under win98...

Granted I started moving to *NIX less than a year after starting to use computers, so I do actually
have more experience with it as a desktop and
I have it doing everything the way I want it to do it
and whenever I use a windows desktop I get irritated that
I can't make it do stuff the way I like it to.

But thats me

Other people who may have been using windows products for a while will get accustomed
to the way they work and would want other software
they use to work the same way.
I remember in first year of collage there were a number of people who wouldn't use the NT machines
and they didn't like the "new fangled" way of doing
things, so they used the win3.11 ones instead

However I will still admit that freenix on the desktop is still a little flakey around the edges,
though I was fiddling with some recent SuSE and RH
releaces recently and it really struck me how pollished
and fuzzy pointy-clickey they were becomming.
Although I don't really like the whole "make it simple for the mases" as it can make the whole
thing rather more complicated under the hood,
I am certain that within the next 4/5 years they
will have products that really do rival MS for
the happy pointy clicky masses!


err... there was probably supposed to be a deep and meaningfull point there somewhere, but hey

Static

Originally posted by Isegrim




but ms can just lose on this.
if they say no they will get bad publicity,
if they say yes they will have a whole bunch of new linux users.

Ms will not pay for machines just for the competition to be installed on them Anyway, any publicity is good publicity, and after all the anti-trust stuff, I don't think microsoft care about the incessant bitching of geeks in tech-magazines/sites.

*awaits flame again* 8)