Why 10 hours for a newbie and 30 days for a "programmer"

[Judy Perry]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Dan Shafer wrote:

> 2. Development tools are a particularly difficult sell into the
> education market because of the wide availability of free, Open Source
> tools.

--In our case, it's even worse.  On the educational end, we eschew the
free, open source dev tools in favor of the "free" stuff dumped on us by
M$...  We just started an MS in software engineering as an online degree
program (a nightmare in itself, but I digress).  So, given that our
sysAdmin has configured/installed the free, open source Moodle course
delivery system, what do you think our CS educators are using?  Yup.
Blackboard which (a) sucks, (b) isn't free, and (c) isn't under our
department's control.

> 3. Educators often (not always) feel they are on a sort of "mission"
> that "entitles" them to reduced pricing and liberal licensing
> enforcement. And some educators who wouldn't say that *would* argue
> that their budgets are small and they can't afford to pay standard
> rates for software, particularly development tools.

--Do you argue that this is an unreasonable position?  If I were working
in a SW development house, would I be expected to buy my own dev tools?
Ever since Rev announced the first HC cross-grade pricing, I've paid for
my annual license despite the fact that I don't sell a dime's worth of
software, only use it in-class, and am not reimbursed by my department.

I don't expect Rev to give it to me free, but given that I am doing free
evangelization for their product and am not making any profit from using
their product, a price reduction strikes me as not unreasonable.

<snip>
>
> The good news (for folks in the education space at least) is that I
> don't get a vote.

--I suspect your vote carries the same or more weight than does mine ;-)

Judy