"The [Microsoft audit] letters were sent from Microsoft's
marketing department with a brochure about its school licensing agreement.
Schools got the message: Suffer the audit, or pony
up the bucks for the costly agreement; up to $40 per
year for any computer, PC or Mac, that could run a
Windows-based application, whether it did or not.

Microsoft also wanted money for any donated computers,
which adorn many a school desktop and often
lack the original documentation, installation CDs, or
license validation cards.

School officials, stung by Microsoft's demands, ill prepared
for audits, and facing the expense of continued
licensing demands, voiced their opposition. The
company quickly backed off its threats.
But the fracas left a bad taste in the
mouths of many an administrator, who realized
that Microsoft was well within its
rights to make such demands.

Microsoft's marketing team did more
for the Linux-in-schools movement with
one letter going to schools in 35 states than
I could have done in a lifetime of school
technology conferences, says Paul Nelson,
founder of K-12 Linux Terminal Server
Package (K12LTSP), a Linux distribution
for schools.

Nelson, who is also a classroom teacher
and the technology coordinator for
Riverdale High School in Portland, Ore.,
says many schools began to realize the cost
of doing business with the software giant.
The Portland school district, for example,
determined at the time that it would take two
full-time employees working all year to meet
Microsoft's demands for documentation on
the district's 25,000 computers.

The cost? More than $100,000. After a
local columnist wrote about Microsoft's letter,
the school district's switchboard was
jammed for two days with phone calls from
open-source programmers volunteering to help move
the system over to Linux.
TCO calculations now have to include the cost of
managing licenses and ever-changing terms of the [licensing
agreements], Nelson says. When schools
come to understand that the Linux open-source license
encourages users to copy and redistribute software and
that it never needs to be registered, the meaning of
free starts to grow on them."