NullPointerFactory

Microsoft has announced it’s giving away Windows Server, Visual Studio, and a bunch of other development tools to all students for free. Big news, right? Naaaaahhhh. Guess what, Microsoft has been giving students software for free for ages. Except they didn’t call it “DreamSpark”, they called it “Piracy”. A student who wanted to learn visual studio, or play with the latest server OS could easily download it through a university’s broadband network or borrow a disk from a techie dormmate. But Microsoft & company never went after disk-swapping students with the bloodhungry zeal often observed with RIAA or MPAA… No… Microsoft counted on them. It always stood to benefit from a “get’em while they’re young approach”- if they get used to developing on and for Windows in school, they’ll seek out jobs that will utilize and expand these competencies.

But of course, it was not to be. In part, because the latest blitzkrieg of anti-piracy technology made student “borrowing” bothersome, and in far greater part because the lingua franca of most computer science courses is Java, often running on Linux or, more and more prominently, Mac OS. To “get’em while they’re young”, Microsoft now needs a more overt, direct effort.

So the benefit of the DreamSpark program to Microsoft is clear. But is there a benefit to students? Without free licenses to instructors and schools themselves, these tools will not be running in labs and on instructors’ machines… hence, we won’t see Comp. Sci. classes switching from Java even without touching the cross-platform issue. The Microsoft C++ compiler could be of some use for windows-based Comp. Sci. students on C++, but it was available for free for a while now. So with the exception of a select few zealots (like me), most students would be relatively unaffected by the release.