Univ. Wisconsin not Renewing Microsoft License
The University of Wisconsin will not sign a new campus or enterprise agreement with Microsoft to replace the one that expires on July 31, 2003. 
None of the options presented by Microsoft were acceptable, as UW’s only options were to give up license ownership by entering into an open-ended lease or to continue license ownership at an over 100% price increase. Budget shortfalls made the latter option impossible. UW says they will now support Sun’s StarOffice suite as they expect many of their current users will not wish to pay for continuing use of the previously licensed MS software. Sun offers educational institutions a no-cost site license of Star Office. Seems to me someone else needs to jump on this opportunity. Red Hat or SuSE should strike a deal with this campus of over 40,000 students to offer them an alternative to the monopoly taxes they are facing. Anyone listening?
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.