According to an article over at TechCrunch (Microsoft To Give Students Dev Software For Free) this would seem to be true. Bill Gates will announce at a talk tomorrow, that they are making much of their developer software free to college and university students. The program, called Microsoft DreamSpark, will be run by Joe Wilson, Senior Director of Academic Initiatives.

Now, after all this time that M/S has been painstakingly seeing to it that MGWA (Microsoft Genuine Windows Advantage) has been rolled out to prevent pirating, buying up as many startups and/or companies that they deemed even slightly competitive due to their inability to create original software that would stand up to competition and outright bullying the competition into believing that some how Linux was created out of some hacked Windows code…this just seems like an about face for them.

I’m wondering as I’m sure others are as well, if M/S is beginning to feel some heat in the OS competition arena. Ever so slight as it may be, it’s still evident they are beginning to hedge their bets with this offer. According to the article and I quote:

“Covered software includes Visual Studio Professional Edition, XNA Game Studio, Expression Studio, SQL Server and Windows Server. Students were previously able to license this software at greatly reduced prices, or got access via their CS department at school (or through other, less legal, means). Now they’ll be able to get the software for free.

Only students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. will have access for now, other countries, and pre-college students, will be added later this year. Microsoft requires verification that you are an actual student - in the U.S. they are partnering with Journeyed, who maintains a database of students.”

This is obviously a wonderful perk for students and rightly so seeing as the software is now free. It also looks like they “recognize they have real competition (including open source alternatives) when it comes to IDEs and other developer tools.”

I’m curious to see how this works out in a few months. Linux is making great strides every day because the developers want to see it get better. M/S on the other hand…they seem to only want to buffalo people into thinking that their OS or software is the only path to go down.

Blatant marketing move by Microsoft, but still, good deal for students.