I understand your contention about teachers who work long hours. I was generalizing to a big degree, I know. I also have a teacher in my family who often worked late into the night and on weekends grading papers, helping students, etc, so yes, I understand that when I say eight hours and weekends off, it’s in the traditional sense.

I also know that my husband is not a teacher, works much more than eight hours a day, and works many hours on his “off days” as well.

So characterizing the jobs as eight hours a day with weekends off was a generalization.

Thanks again for the mention and your thoughtful post.

I don’t know the figures for how much Minnesota has already invested, how much the court costs were to get Microsoft to give the state what it was due, etc. I imagine a lot of money has been spent by Minnesota.

What if, five or so years ago, before accepting the original deal for software and hardware from Microsoft, Minnesota public education had just switched to OpenOffice.org and Linux instead of Windows and Microsoft Office? OpenOffice.org is absolutely free, Linux is cheap to free.

None of those pesky court costs either,with open source software like OpenOffice.org. No need to keep track of the number of users, licenses, etc. with open source software. All the hassle of just dealing with Microsoft goes out the window too.

The “total cost of ownership” when dealing with Microsoft can be pretty high.