A Linux user has exposed some very interesting facts about Microsoft's practices

Jan 18, 2014 22:31 GMT  ·  By

We are being used with the fact that Windows has a huge share of the market, but we don’t even begin to fathom how Microsoft is keeping it that way. This is probably just one example of the practices of Microsoft, at least for the United States.

Ken Starks, an editor for fossforce.com, has published some very interesting details, about his struggle in the last seven years, to find out why the Austin Independent School District forces the students and the parents to spend copious sums of money on Microsoft Software, when free Linux alternatives are readily available.

The entire problem started from the fact that the school informed him, as the parent of young girl going to school in that particular district, that he needs to buy her a Microsoft Office license in order to finish her studies.

After trying to explain to the school that they didn't actually need that expensive solution for the small projects the children were doing, he eventually got stonewalled especially when he wanted to know how much was costing the school. He did manage to get some interesting information though.

It turns out that it might have been illegal for the schools to remove Windows or Microsoft Office from the computers, due to a vendor agreement the school district signed with Microsoft.

The article and the struggle of Ken Starks makes for a very interesting read, but it seems that Microsoft Office is just the tip of the iceberg. The schools are also running Exchange servers and other Microsoft services, which means that they are pretty much bound to a proprietary solution, without any hope of ever getting a Linux alternative.