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Free Microsoft Software for students - But Not To Indian Students

Looking at this headline "Microsoft Giving Away Free Developer Software To Students" in this article got me quite excited. I thought it is an excellent opportunity for all the college students in India especially in this day and age when we are lamenting that they are not good enough when they join the industry and how the industry has to spend a lot of money in training them.
So I continued reading the article and I read this line "Microsoft is announcing right now DreamSpark, a new program that gives free developer, designer and related software to college students in 11 countries. DreamSpark goes live today in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States..." If you noticed there is no mention of India in this list of countries which made me wonder, "Why is there no India?" If you notice there is even China in the list.

I was wondering why and I then read the following line "Students will go to Microsoft’s Channel 8 site to download any of the software, following a third-party authentication process to verify they are a current student." Maybe in India we do not have a reliable third-party authentication process. But then with a bit of money I am sure there will be enough agencies that will set this up for Microsoft especially if they consider India to be an IT hub producing the world class talent they keep talking about.
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Comments

Unknown said…
Thats too bad! Mostly all the softwares Microsoft make for anything key persons are Indians and they are not providing software for indian students free!
4:22 PM, February 19, 2008
Nikhil said…
The question is, do you really want microsoft software. This is just a ploy by microsoft so that students don't use open source development tools which are cross platform, high quality and free. Because it would not be good for there windows monopoly. This is very good. Maybe students will go for other products
6:56 PM, February 19, 2008
Sudeep Dsouza said…
Nikhil - using open source or microsoft products is really not the issue here. The issue here is that the students of Indian schools and colleges are being denied a benefit that students from the other countries are getting. According to me this is unfair especially since Microsoft has their biggest development center outside of Seattle here in India.
7:42 PM, February 19, 2008
Nikhil said…
i think they didn't want more programmers from other countries losing their jobs to Indians :p
6:53 PM, February 20, 2008
Sudeep Dsouza said…
Well thats an angle I never considered so far but it is sure an interesting dimension to this whole thing. Well by not doing this they are only encouraging the Indian students to use pirated software as they cant afford to buy it.
9:09 PM, February 22, 2008
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