For those of you that like me are members of the ACM – Association for Computing Machinery, the last one has been a sad autumn; in fact, the DreamSpark, the huge pack of software that Microsoft makes available for students, is not available any more for member of the ACM.

 

It means that as students, we are still able to register to https://www.dreamspark.com/ and be able to download a good number of free software from Microsoft, but we are not able to log in as ACM members and benefit from the additional software that was available to members of our association.

 

I contacted the ACM customer support; they told me that it was a decision of Microsoft, not to provide that software through DreamSpark to any institution that is not a University. Therefore, the ACM has been excluded from the list.

 

The Microsoft’s initiative is still praiseworthy, but in my opinion ACM should have communicate to every student member the change in the policy from Microsoft as soon as it was aware of it, in order to allow every student to make a decision about renewing the subscription to the association.

 

I would have renewed it all the same, especially for the huge amount of courses it allows to access, but I would have preferred to be informed.

 

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