Microsoft Dreamspark

[teh silly]

Ok kiddies, listen up. Microsoft Dreamspark. All of the good and useful Microsoft software. Legitimate. For free.

 

Microsoft Dreamspark

 

The catch is you have to be a student.

[Kim-Lan]

It looks really awesome. But I am not a university or college student.

 

I hope they're still up in a few years, when I go to college.

[Kyougi]

They may be giving the software away for free, but it's far from being free software.

 

They may be giving the software away for free, but it's far from being free software.

[teh silly]

I guess it's not free if you count the effort and cost you put into verifying you are a student and downloading it? Of course the software itself is not universally free...

[Kyougi]

This is the definition of free software according to GNU and FSF: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

 

It's a matter of liberty, not price.

[teh silly]

I see what you mean I guess.

 

I'm talking free beer.

 

Still, I think it's kind of silly to make these kinds of generalizations for a Microsoft product, any of which are normally immediately associated with a hefty price tag.

 

By the way, an interesting side note: "free" software (in the GNU sense) is very rarely, in my opinion, "better" than proprietary software. It's true that Linux, for example, is great and free and stuff. It has many utilities and little programs like [bleeped!], which make me chuckle. I often write code on Linux. But I would never forgo my Windows installations for it. Nor would I stop using .NET, which I view as a better IDE than anything I've found in Linux. In fact, were I forced to choose between Linux and Windows, I would most likely go with Windows.

 

EDIT: I forgot about the bleeping... well, the program name is the acronym for the three letter "WT..."