Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["William F. Geschwind" <geschwin AT email.unc.edu>]

I'm sorry, but this is the biggest crock of nonsense I've heard in a long
time. What if somebody wants to donate an old PC that was built from
scratch? (basically by going to your local friendly computer parts store and
buying a motherboard, case, memory, hard drive, etc. and bolting all the
parts together - I have done this time and time again over the years). No
operating system comes with a PC of this type straight out of the box (well,
actually an ABit mobo I bought two years ago did come with some version of
Linux on the driver CD!!). Should a cash-starved institution automatically
reject something like that just because it didn't come out of the box with
an O/S? What if you put either a store-bought full version of a MS OS or
some sort of open source OS on it? Is it suddenly not legal anymore? What a
load of $hit!!

Or looking at this from another standpoint, my boss at UNC tells me that
when I prepare to take old machines to surplus, that I should wipe all of
the software off of the hard drive, including the OS, mainly to avoid
liability issues in the case that sensitive information should be on the
computer when it was taken out of service. If I have a batch of computers
(usually a dozen or three at a time) to take to Ye Ole Surplus Shoppe, I'll
be damned if I spend a day installing an OS on each of them. They get them
on a pallet with empty hd's. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I
understand, computers from UNC's surplus shop end up at central surplus in
Raleigh, where they are refurbished with prison labor and then distributed
to more needy school districts throughout the state.

- Bill

----- Original Message -----
From: "Josef Komenda" <joe AT komejo.com>
To: "InterNetWorkers" <internetworkers AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2002 5:45 PM
Subject: [internetworkers] FUD alert!


> This is interesting:
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/education/?id=DonatedComputers
>
> "If you feel it is in the best interest of your school to accept the
donated
> PCs, make sure that the hardware donation includes the original operating
> system software. Keeping the operating system with the PC is not just a
> great benefit - it is a legal requirement."
>
> Joe K
>
>
> ---
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