Well I saw the sea of dead posts about this topic here before I commented - I wasn't afraid of condoning the use of Microsoft software as much as one of those people would then maybe comment and start off something like that for a small comment I left in hopes that there might be someone else on HN that might find it useful. (And now I notice that more of the comments not-dead on this link are about Microsoft than the DreamSpark program itself...) I personally don't care what I use as long as I can use it for the task at hand, and I also don't care what others choose to use. I think that these tools that are normally fairly expensive now free for academic use to be a nice little touch, but then again I also appreciate that most commercial software is also available at low/no cost to students and educators.

What does bother me is kneejerk reactions to being against Microsoft for no good reason. So I use Mac OS X mainly, and *bsd or Linux for servers, and I contribute to an open source project. I still find a use for Server 2008 and Windows Mobile and more..