I think there is now a serious problem for educational institutions.

For quite some time (~2001-  ~2005, sorry if I don't get 
the dates right - anyway, it was the time we bought a lot of sun rays)
our sun partner explained to us that all RTUs are covered by the 
"Sun EduSoft software portfolio":
<http://web.archive.org/web/20040407042748/www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/promotions/edusoft/institution/>

For a symbolic price of  ~500$/year per university(!) it gave us the RTU 
for a lot of software (Solaris, Staroffice, SRSS and a lot more, see here:
<http://web.archive.org/web/20040407044601/www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/promotions/edusoft/institution/productlist.html>
) on every machine on the campus. 

In 2006, our Sun partner had good news for us: we can save 500$/year, Sun has 
discontinued EduSoft since the software included is now free-to-use anyway,
for anybody.
 
Now we learn that this is not true anymore for SRSS.  

If you know anything about the budget of state univerities then you know 
that we can't pay $6250 for a 50-seat students pool in addition to all
the hardware we bought from Sun. (Not to mention that our PC partner 
would happily replace one third of the pool by shiny new PCs for this 
"right-to-use" money.)

Staying indefinitely with the last SRSS version included in the 
EduSoft programme is also not a long-term option - and I am not
even sure whether this were legally clean - EduSoft worked with 
annual payments. 

So what offers (concerning SRSS) has Sun to make to universities -
after they have a) scrapped  EduSoft and b) stopped providing 
SRSS free-to-use as part of the solaris enterprise system?

Meik
 

-- 
Meik Hellmund
Mathematisches Institut, Uni Leipzig
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.math.uni-leipzig.de/~hellmund
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