£30 Annual Tax Per PC? You Cannot Be Sirius

Sirius has put up another of its excellent interviews, this time with Stephen Lucey, Executive Director (Strategic Technologies) of BECTA.

The killer section is as follows:

This relates to circumstances where schools using Microsoft’s School Agreement licensing model, are required to pay Microsoft licensing fees for computers based on Linux, or using OpenOffice.org. Finding ourselves in a position whereby a school pays (say) £169 for a device only to be faced with for example a £30 per year after year payment to Microsoft, for a system that is not running any of their software would just not be acceptable to Becta. Indeed I don’t think many people would consider that fair.

No, I don't either. Strange, then, that it's still going on.