Monday, September 15, 2008

The Absurdity of The Microsoft Tax

I noticed a piece in The Australian today about the terrible situation schools in South Australia find themselves in.

If you ever wonder what the impact of the Microsoft monopoly is just read this article and realise that our schools are being forced to pay huge license fees to the Satan from Seattle. That's taxpayer money being shipped overseas at a great rate because of vendor lock in, monopoly behaviour and the cowardice of both state and federal governments to tell MS to take a huge hike.

When will someone in government realise that we could be spending that money hiring Aussie programmers to improve Linux so that Australian schools and governments could use it. More than 25% of the federal government grant to schools is being wasted on the license fees for a third-rate bootloader suffering from feature creep.

I'd say I was appalled but I passed appalled years ago. I think we should tell MS that if they want to sell their fourth-rate, bug-ridden, insecure operating system in this country they can grant all schools and universities a free license.

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