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Editor's Note: This is obviously a very emotional issue, certainly for me. However, I have tried to write a classic "distinterested journalist" story and confine my personal reaction to my editorial. But please read the story below first.
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A narrow majority of the CUUG Board of Directors voted, in a special
and very fractious meeting Sunday, to completely change over all CRC
services to center around the Windows NT operating system.
The unprecedented and extremely divisive move pursues a sponsorship deal
with Microsoft, which in the words of President Roxanne Brunskill, was
"the proverbial offer they couldn't refuse".
While not defined as a single figure, even the proposal's most bitter opponents concede that the monetary value will be at least one million Canadian dollars when the value of all hardware, software, networking and services is calculated. Beginning with July 1st, 1996, and running through June 30th, 2001, Microsoft and hardware companies that run Windows NT will provide the CRC with a dazzling array of equipment that will be updated yearly. The sponsorship will include: One of Digital Equipment's best Alpha servers that run Windows NT; two "top of the line" MIPS workstations running same; and no less than four Intel-based NT machines which to start with will each use four 200-MHz Pentium Pro CPU's and 64MB of RAM. Lastly, there will be no fewer than eight single-processor Pentium Pro workstations that will normally be reserved for on-site use with external logins disabled except for sysops. The list continues, however. The CRC will have its own Cisco router that will cost as much as the best workstations, providing a 100 Mbps LAN in the CRC, and connecting it to a local Microsoft data centre via the Calgary MetroNet network at roughly 40 Mbps. That centre, to open in Calgary in late June to provide Microsoft Network (MSN) service to the city, will provide both an upstream connection to the Internet with a 150 Mbps "OC-3" line, and all "modem farm" operations. Members will connect to the MSN office and then be routed to the CRC. This will relieve the CRC sysops of the tedious burden of operating the "modem farm", allowing themselves to concentrate on the servers and workstations themselves. Members will be able to use the rest of the MSN services, including direct connection to the Internet without using the CRC, for a reduced "group rate" compared to standard Microsoft charges. Members who do not pay Microsoft the additional fee will only be able to conduct shell sessions with CRC machines and only use character-based programs such as lynx and gopher to go through them to the Internet. Enthusiasts for the deal pointed out how this will clearly separate our organization from Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The CRC will be clearly positioned as a site on the Internet rather than a gateway to it. The finishing touch on the irresistibility of the offer was a definite commitment to service. Microsoft will provide a person-year per year of technical support, including hundreds of hours of support on the NT environment itself "as we work together to smooth the transition |
from Unix to NT, and prove that NT can handle anything Unix can" in the
words of one MS staffer. Microsoft will also partially compensate the various
hardware partners for support of their equipment, making fixes less
of a "charity" effort than they have been in the past.
The extraordinary turn of events apparently started with the November, 1995 CUUG general meeting, when Microsoft Canada representative Hal Carmichael bravely faced the crowd to lead the NT side of the panel discussion "Unix or NT or Both?". Carmichael had expected a bad time and there were moments when he was not disappointed. At one point, he did get a laugh by wishing aloud that he had just stayed home. However, Carmichael realized that he was "not dealing with fanatic idealogues" as he heard sympathetic reactions to some of the shots taken at Unix solutions, and sensed a turning point when arch-opponent Terry Ingoldsby conceded that "CDM was too little, too late" and that "Unix has as good as lost the desktop". The overwhelming vote at the end for the "Both" solution caused Carmichael to go home a very thoughtful man. Less than a week later, after refining his notion with Microsoft Canada colleagues, Carmichael sent an E-mail to the home office in Redmond, Washington, proposing a very different sponsorship than the one that eventually resulted. The proposal was for a far more modest offer which would have involved only one computer running NT, one that would join all the Unix machines currently in the CRC. The reply that came back from Redmond in mid-January left Carmichael stunned. The E-mail came directly from Bill Gates and insisted in definite terms that the sponsorship must not allow NT and Unix to run side-by-side; the CRC would have to become an all-NT shop. Excerpts from Bill Gates' E-mail were made available by Carmichael. As the message indicates, Gates was not so concerned with the exact size of the sponsorship as with the publicity coup it would bring for "the largest Unix user group in North America" to switch completely over to NT. For the group to merely accept NT as another solution running side-by-side with various Unix variants would not allow Microsoft to make a very strong statement in their presentations and advertisements. The E-mail uses the phrase "I don't care if it costs a million dollars", and indeed, a million Canadian dollars is the lowest estimate of the Microsoft sponsorship - and a million American may be more accurate. The value of the hardware alone will exceed $400,000 Canadian. Yearly updates will see about half that value injected every year as older equipment is sold off and equivalent machines with up-to-the-month technology replacing them. The value of the networking, modem connections, and Internet bandwidth provided will exceed $100 per member per year. Multiplied by five years, the most casual back-of-the-envelope gives a net present value of over a million.
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