Students can has free Microsoft dev software.O rly? Ya rly.

No other company comes to mind that treats students as well as Microsoft. You only need to look at initiatives such MSDN Academic Alliance - where students can obtain Microsoft software for free for non-commercial use, and The Ultimate Steal (It’s Not Cheating) - the $60 Office 2007 Ultimate offer for students to appreciate their generosity. Others like Adobe and Apple offer marginal discounts for academics, but nothing close to these.

Today, Microsoft’s evangelism team has announced a new offer called “DreamSpark” where students from all year levels and specializations can acquire a range of professional-edition development and design software from Microsoft at a cost of only a few clicks and minutes. The catch is that students will need to verify their identity at their institutions and not all institutions have an identity system set up, but that’s only a matter of time before they should and would.

Whilst there might seem like an overlap between DreamSpark and MSDNAA, the difference is that MSDNAA requires involvement from the school and it also costs them money I believe. This offer, whilst still requires education providers to set up a system to verify identities of their students, allows students to go directly to Microsoft whether or not their schools are MSDNAA subscribers or not, which a surprisingly large number are not. MSDNAA also offers client operating systems where DreamSpark does not.

The range of softwares available currently include:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• XNA Creators Club Online

The offer is currently only available to institutions from Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom. and United States. If your country, like Australia, isn’t listed, it doesn’t mean it’s not available there, it just means no institutions have provided an identity verification system to Microsoft yet. If your school isn’t listed, start spamming your school’s IT department with the previous link.

Obviously Microsoft recognizes the ease of acquiring pirated software in a school environment and are taking innovative yet rational steps not to punish those who are acquiring Microsoft software as students, but providing them with alternative and cheaper methods of doing so that’s within the law. Of course, it also makes sense from a marketing point of view to get kids hooked on these drugs, I mean software, at an early age. As a student, kudos to them.

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