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The DreamSpark program is one of the newest initiatives to come out of Redmond that are very, very un-Microsoft-like. I'll talk about another later in this post. It appears as though University and high school students will, at some point (I don't know the hardcore details) be able to receive free copies of Visual Studio, SQL server, and other development servers and enterprise servers. They can use these for non-commercial uses free of charge.
What will the impact be of things like this? I think the first impact we will see is that a lot of post-graduates are going to be able to produce thesis material on Microsoft back-end, enterprise, and development tools. If a computer science student wants to explore some strange new way to get data out of SQL server and reconstitute it in a UI - all of the tools required for that pipeline will be free. Granted, VS used to be pretty cheap for students, but I don't think students ever had free access to SQL server and other servers beyond the 180-day trial copies. Really though, if these students needed the Microsoft resources, they got them, whether illegally or by just suffering through a rebuild of their lab every 180 days when the trials ran out. This is really just Microsoft removing what was otherwise an annoyance and inconvenience.
High school students, on the other hand, will benefit even more from this. They don't have access to huge computer science labs, creative professors with lots of resources, or hundreds of peers in the same major. High school students should now be able to start experimenting with creating "real-world" applications using the same tools that you and I use right now to build our apps. If you're an optimist, and you're responsible for hiring new talent, you'll think that in a few years, this will start spilling over into the job market creating a lot of new potential employees who have years of experience with MSFT products even before they graduate college. If you have tried to hire competent MSFT professionals lately, you know how difficult it is to find good people with good experience.
In short, this is an excellent maneuver for Microsoft. The more developers you have excited about your community, the more applications your community produces. The more applications your community produces, the more would-be developers get excited and decide to "check this stuff out", who then begin producing applications. The self-fulfilling cycle continues to grow. Microsoft has never courted its developers in this fashion before, and it's a long time in coming.
However, it's not enough. What Microsoft should be doing is giving the software away for free to anyone. The people who need free access to MS development tools are existing developers who are currently working on Ruby, Java, C++, C, Linux, whatever. They are the ones that you want to be able to say "meh, I'll give it a shot. It's free." and experiment with programming in a Microsoft world.
The OS X DVD itself comes with all of the development tools you need in order to build extremely high quality applications for Leopard. You get Dashcode for building widgets, you get Xcode for your compiler, you get Interface Builder to construct your UIs, and you even get Quartz Composer, which is quite possibly one of the single most impressive development tools ever built in the history of programming.
If there isn't enough room on the Vista DVD (which wouldn't surprise me), add yet another edition of the OS, Windows Vista Ultimate Developer Edition. Same price as Windows Vista Ultimate, but it comes with a DVD containing VS 2008 and a DVD containing SQL Server 200x Developer Edition and a DVD containing the entire Expression Suite. If they need to recover media printing cost, add $6 to the price of the box. This is what Microsoft should do if they want to keep their developers as happy as the developers in other camps and attact new developers at the rate some of the other camps are attracting developers.
In closing, yes this is cool. No, it isn't enough. Ray Ozzie needs to do even more to break down Microsoft's Ivory Tower image and start courting the developers as if they are the ones who are crucial to the success of the company... because they are.
Some universities (including my own) take part in MSDNAA which offers MSDN
accounts with free versions of Windows, Visual Studio etc to all students
on computer science courses. I'm not sure how widespread this is though, my
university has fairly close ties with Microsoft (I believe they're the only
independent Microsoft innovation centre in the UK). I agree that free
developer tools helps a lot to get developers to try things out but I don't
think there really needs to be an extra edition/DVD. You can download the
full suite of Xcode tools from ADC so offering them free on MSDN would
likely work.
True, but if they added developer/student editions, they could make for an
even 10 different editions of Vista :) But seriously, I wasn't aware of
MSDNAA... If they offered all the tools as free downloads for everyone,
that would be just fine with me... and we might see more early adoption of
MS technologies by students, which might encourage more companies who are
hiring these people to adopt that technology. It would be a win-win for MS.
I think the point that students have always had access is really the key.
Even now it is easy to find a hobbiest ( and some companies ) that dip into
the warez or crack pile. When I was in school we had easy access to
everything on the MS platform since we all shared our DVDS. Outside of the
US I think you'll find this done to a greater extent.
