Submitted by Sascha on Fri, 09/26/2008 - 23:15.
Microsoft is offering some of it’s higher-end developer products away for free in hopes it will boost it’s customer base in the future using Microsoft based products instead of Mac OSX and free-open source (Linux) products. It’s offering Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Expression Studio, xna Game Studio 2.0 and Microsoft SQL Server free to thousands of students around the world.
Naturally, many will be suspicious of getting anything for free from Microsoft, but in this case, there's very little to worry about. Most of the software is several years old or - in the case of Expression Studio - so unused in the wider world that using them is unlikely to actually help you get a job.
The one exception: Visual Studio 2008.
Obviously Microsoft will take an initial loss on this, and I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to complain about:
- A very stable, XP like operating system
- Pretty good Graphics, Web and Media creation and editing software
- Game Development Software
- A high class C#, Java, ASP.net and Visual Basic programming suite
all for free (note: legally). They’re calling the initiative “DreamSpark” and you can find the site here. To be quite truthfully honest, I’m surprised I haven’t seen more about this in the technology media or on social news sites (Digg, I’m looking at you), and there’s been little publicity about it from Universities and Colleges, so check it out, and annoy your College or University to get you the access logins you need!
