Sitting in an IT usergroup meeting at work this morning, a curious and worrisome fact came to light.

Microsoft do something called Volume Licensing for large businesses. You sign a repulsively large chunk of cash away to them, along with your mortal soul and whatever else they hide in the fine print, and they give you all the software and support you need for some period of time. This is generally a soup-to-nuts deal, covering everything you could possibly want from server OSes and big powerful business management tools down to Outlook and MS Office for Joe Bloggs the user. Getting yourself hooked on the MS teat this way is obviously dangerous and short-sighted, but many companies (including, regrettably, my own) love this sort of one-stop-shop for their IT needs.

What I discovered today after much wheedling is that our IT department's VL contract payments work on the basis of "number of computers on the site". Read that again. Not "every Windows install". Not "every Microsoft product in use". Every single machine!

This raises the rather ludicrous spectre of our IT dept having to pay Microsoft for all the computers that I use... even though they all run Linux.

So, Nine Inch Nails released the second of their "open source" albums the other day. It's not half bad either. Grab it here if you're into that sort of noise for your ears.

Is free music a pipe dream, doomed to be promulgated by loads of nobodies no-one's ever heard of and perhaps a small handful of well-off musicians when they occasionally feel like standing up and shouting "fuck the institution!"? Will it always be the exception, or could it someday become the rule? Is it really possible for artists to make a living distributing their product for free?

I honestly have no idea.