The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) report also states that most establishments surveyed do not believe that Microsoft’s licensing agreements provide value for money, while a separate review has recommended against the deployment of Vista and Office 2007 (see separate story).
Last week Becta signed a 12-month extension to its Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft that enables schools to negotiate cheaper software deals, but many schools will not be taking advantage of it if they follow Becta’s advice.
Institutions that are not currently utilizing a Microsoft subscription licensing agreement… should consider carefully whether, in the absence of the changes Becta is recommending, they should enter into such agreements, the review, entitled Microsoft’s Academic Licensing Programmes, stated.
Institutions which are considering the purchase of additional Microsoft perpetual licenses, and which do not have access to Select pricing, should await the outcome of Becta’s final report… before making a final decision on the purchase of additional licenses, it added.
That final report is not due until this time next year, which means that while the agreement has been extended for a further 12 months, Becta is effectively advising any educational establishments not on Select agreements to ignore it.
The review includes eight recommendations for Microsoft to improve its academic licensing programs in order to deal with issues such as potential lock-in, confusing pricing, and restrictive licensing terms.
The recommendations were made after Becta’s review found that Microsoft’s licensing arrangements in the education sector pose significant potential for institutions to find themselves locked in to Microsoft’s subscription licensing agreements… and very significant complexity… that has resulted in widespread use of inappropriate licensing strategies.
According to the review, over 70% of institutions surveyed did not realize the level of buy-out costs before entering into commercial subscription agreements, while 55% of respondents said the buy-out payment was unaffordable or only affordable with difficulty.
For a typical secondary school the cost of buy-out for desktop products alone would be the equivalent of a new teacher’s annual salary, the report stated.
Consequently most establishments surveyed did not believe that Microsoft’s licensing agreements provide value for money.
There was a small (but not statistically significant) balance towards those that said the licenses did not represent value for money compared to those that said they did, the report stated.
For example, just 24% of secondary schools said the agreements represented value for money, compared to 46% at further education colleges, and 67% at special schools.
One of the issues that led to this opinion was the fact that academic customers have no access to a Microsoft subscription agreement that automatically grants the right to use the software in perpetuity, while another was the fact that school subscription pricing is based on the total number of ‘eligible’ computers irrespective of whether Microsoft software is installed, required or used on the computers.
According to Becta’s report, an eligible PC is defined as any computer with a Pentium II processor or higher, or Apple Inc Macintoshes (G3 or higher), meaning that a school could even find itself paying Microsoft for software that it is unable to run on its Apple Macs.
Becta also criticized the fact that the best value licensing scheme, Select, is only available to establishments with 250 or more PCs and placed an undue burden on them to predict their usage.
In a context where Microsoft itself is unable to accurately forecast product releases for three years it is not very reasonable to expect educational institutions to be able to forecast demand for Microsoft products three years ahead, the report noted.
The review of Microsoft’s licensing and potential alternatives was announced in January 2006 in order to examine Microsoft’s subscription licensing models and the risks associated with non-perpetual licenses.
The review also considered the potential barriers to Microsoft alternatives following a May 2005 Becta report that had indicated that the use of Linux and OpenOffice.org could produce total cost savings of 44% per PC for primary schools and 24% for secondary schools, compared to standard commercial software PC configurations.
On the subject of promoting alternatives, Becta noted that the UK’s Open Source Consortium would like to see Becta proactively promoting choice by adopting open source standards and stated that it will discuss with key stakeholders the practical steps it could take to facilitate wider competition in choice in relation to software licensing in schools.
Earlier this week the OSC’s president, Mark Taylor, criticized Becta for entering into the extension with Microsoft despite its own research indicating cheaper open source alternatives. We’d like to congratulate Becta for getting a discount on their season ticket for the Titanic, he said.
The agency had not responded to a request to elaborate on its reasons for extending the MoU by press time although in announcing it Stephen Lucey, Becta executive director, estimated that the understanding has saved UK schools GBP47m ($91m) since it came in to effect in January 2004.
Microsoft did not respond to request for comment by press time.
