In a bid to curb all competition with open source software in India, Microsoft has “partnered” with AICTE to make Office 365 for Education mandatory in all technical institutions in India. The office suite provides features like 25GB cloud storage, Outlook messaging and calendar along with Office webapps online. This is to be made available for free cost for all students and faculty members across all the Indian Technical Institutions and is to be implemented everywhere latest by 30th June 2013.
This move is expected to add a user base of more than 7.5 million users to the Microsoft bandwagon which includes around 7 million students and 500,000 faculty members which will make AICTE the largest customer for Microsoft, according to a press release on the Microsoft website which announces the new partnership which is being called
Microsoft Live@Edu.
Dr. S. S. Mantha, Chairman of AICTE added, “Microsoft’s cloud platform will make for a truly progressive ecosystem and contribute to the country’s technical education by providing a better communication and collaboration platform for institutes and students.”
While this definitely appears to be a positive move in terms of providing a good IT infrastructure to students in India, it has been a hugely debated move where mandatory imposition of a few corporate products to all institutions without offering them a choice is being resisted by many groups. EFYtimes.com reports that Indian Linux Users Group (ILUG) will be opposing this and some other open source developers are even expected to file an RTI application to understand in detail why such a vendor lock-in is being promoted forcibly by the government body.
While further details are awaited on how this is likely to be played out by the open source community, it is clear that Microsoft stands to gain a lot from this partnership even though it may be providing all the services free of cost. For further details you can access the official announcement from AICTE here.
great!corruption has reached education also.this should be added to the already huge list of scams.