Hi guys,
I'm not sure if any of you are aware, but Microsoft is giving out free - fully functional editions of various software to TERTIARY (College/University) Students.

It is currently available to "United Kingdom, Canada, China, Germany, France, Finland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium". (Australia too if you coerce it slightly)

https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

Just follow the instructions, you will need a Windows Live account. Your tertiary provider should be in the list which you select from.

Software Available includes:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
• Expression Studio (includes Web, Blend, Media and Design)
• SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
• Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition, with SP2
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition
• XNA Game Studio 2.0 (with 12-month Creators Club trial membership)
• Virtual PC

Regards,
Ero Sennin.

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Microsoft doesn't give out any software totally free, they always restrict your freedom somehow. The license always restricts you from redistributing it in some way or doesn't allow you acces to the source code.

I think what you mean is they're giving away some of their software free of charge, but there's still a catch, like not for commercial use.

The reason why they do it, is because it makes their software more populate, it's a loss leader. If they give some of their software away free of charge to students, it means that when they grow up and get jobs in industry they're more likely to buy it.

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I agree.

If you check the list of products you should notice that they are not products that most people would buy. They hope to take market share from successful counterparts by giving MS products away.

Microsoft does allow no-charge non commercial use of their visual studio C#, C++ and basic compilers which I use. It was part of a move to put borland out of business who some years ago had a much better compiler. MS hired many of the developers away from Borland. The MS compilers you see today are built upon that somewhat question action. From a moral standpoint they should have purchased the products from Borland. MS in not the first company to do this.

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their interpretation of "free" is still too expensive for me to even concider d/l and using their tripe

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Yes, the catch is non-commercial use. As the system was intended for tertiary students, I don't think they'd be using it for commercial purposes...
Yes, they want the students to like them and remember them later on, but hey... it's free enough and good enough for my purpose so I'm not complaining haha...

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windows defender is ultimate free program you can download

 

I work at a University. We have a lot of this as well. The people I work with are in films and production. I work in Teleconferencing they just installed the latest Server from Apple giving it a try.

In addition they have purchased ($20,000 us) in laptops to supply to the Navajo Nation to be used in our (Tel Sessions) as well as for study. These student's are more graphical and will be using them for gaming art and production.

But I'm waiting to see if there will be any pressure by Apple in attracting Software Engineers to begin working on other environments for them as well maybe creating more open source.

Novell & Wordperfect are targeted by Microsoft in our area as well a lot of people lost their jobs.

 

Or we could all just use linux! That is TRUE freedom.

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You *have* to be kidding. Right?


Torben

 

never underestimate the power of ignorance

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