In Seattle, Microsoft Corp. is giving away sophisticated writing tools/soft wares to students. A move to make such websites rich and raises the challenge higher by a notch towards Adobe System Inc. also intensifying challenges against open source softwares.

It has been release that soft wares like, a software development environment found in Visual Studio Preofessional Edition, this includes graphic, web design and state of the art Web-desktop programming tools that includes XNA,  a game making studio development program.

Microsoft will also give away Standard Edition of Windows Server and SQL Server 2005 Development Edition.

Bill Gates said that Microsoft’s arranged discounts for education of these programs had deem not been effective since only a number of students has used DreamSpark, saying that this gesture of giving free softwares will open up to many more students who would need the following programs mentioned above.

He seems to be sure that it’s all good for the business so Gates claims.

”We give up some revenue, but we gain the fact that we’ll get the feedback of these students, get more courses to incorporate our tools into the programs and get more startups where kids are familiar with Visual Studio, Expression Studio and SQL Server,” Gates said in a phone interview.

It is said to be a brilliant move to promote the programs and in making the programs familiar to the students. Microsoft is very confident that the said programs are very advanced and far more powerful than Linux based programs, Apache Web Server, MySQL database and PHP scripting that are all used in Web site developments.

The programs are not open and available to students across the US, Belgium, China, Finland, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, UK and Switzerland, covering over 35 million students.

Dream Spark will be available to high school students all over the world starting this fall and to college students in some countries next year.

Check this link to see if you are able to download the free software through this link:

: http://channel8.msdn.com