Thanks for your reply. If I knew what was going on, I wouldn't be asking Slashdot. As for whether the project is a motivation for whatever might be going on, I have no idea, but it has apparently come up in the many-tentacled discussions with the subwoofered one. If this seems surreal to you, it is, I suspect, rather more so to me. Someone on the other side of the divide seems to have been reading too much bad fiction.

The difference would probably be that Linux is not uncommon for either research or study, and that a university that cannot provide support to the point of supporting a sizeable minority of students using Linux-based systems probably also has inferior programs in areas where Linux would normally be used (CS, EE, etc.).