This whole issue just p's me off. Namibia is just next door to my country, and M$ has tried this one on us too! (And got away with it). The problem, as I see it, is that embedding M$ software reliance is a double edged sword: firstly, (as a Linux & OS related solutions vendor) we have to use thier crappy software, and secondly, we have to pay in U$. For us in Southern Africa, that amounts to a fortune, as our exchange rates have been hammered in the past few years by greedy US bankers. The effect of M$ "donating$" their products to the South African government, though, has been that just as South Africa was ready to ditch them in favour of a Linux desktop, they pulled the government back from the brink and re-established themselves as the primary desktop vendor to the SA government. This has the knockon effect that everyone else follows suite: you cant submit a tender document in StarOffice format, no no, use must use a Word Document (emulators, blast em to hell, mission etc.) By M$ making strategic "donations" with strings attached, they wrap up the market tightly. Give it to schools? Why don't you give the little schoolchildren heroin instead? It's gonna work out cheaper for them in the end.