[K12OSN] Good Citizen Microsoft

["Terrell Prudé, Jr."]

Let's not forget that they threatened school districts in their own 
backyard with audits unless they bought Software Assurance and Licensing 
6.0. They backed off--at least in Oregon, I don't know about 
Washington--only after they saw the massive backlash and movement toward 
K12LTSP.

Yeah...really good citizens...all the more reason to go with FOSS and 
projects like K12LTSP.

--TP

Rick Barnich wrote:

> It occurred to me that when pitching K12LTSP, Linux and FOSS to school 
> systems, perhaps one should point out what a good neighbor Microsoft 
> is to the state of Washington. Recently, /Forbes/ ranked Seattle as 
> the most overpriced city in the country. Our school class sizes are 
> the fourth largest in the nation. Washington's percentage of residents 
> enrolled in college ranks 46th out of 50 states. Seattle teacher 
> salaries rank 97th out of 100 major cities. Our traffic is the 17th 
> worst in the country. And let's not forget more than 167,000 
> Washington children without health care and the growing ranks of 
> homeless citizens staking out highway off-ramps in search of handouts.
>
> Seven years ago, Microsoft opened a small office in Reno, Nev., to 
> collect the money it got from PC manufacturers that installed Windows 
> and Office on the computers they sold. In the years since, Microsoft 
> has sheltered more than $60 billion in royalty revenue in Nevada, a 
> state with no corporate income tax, costing Washington an estimated 
> $327 million in unrealized tax revenue.
>
> Washington(state) collected $16.1 million in taxes on software 
> royalties of $3.3 billion for all companies over the past four years. 
> Yet Microsoft reported that it earned more than $34 billion in revenue 
> from PC and device manufacturers during the same period. Had Microsoft 
> paid taxes on this revenue in Washington, it should have generated 
> $164.5 million for the state—far more than the $16.1 million collected 
> on software sales by all companies.
>
> http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0439/040929_news_microsoft.php
>
> Rick Barnich