As a software developer for a lab within a big University, I appreciate the bit about Google offering edu discounts, but only if working with a representative _for the entire institution_. A lot of big companies offer discounts this way and it is maddening.
There are so many different development projects within a university setting and they often operate with zero involvement of campus IT. It's like expecting a foreign company to involve their federal government in purchasing a software license.
The worst is when it's clear that bargaining has happened: limited use site licenses. There is a hypothetical microscope that costs over 250k and has a service contract. All output files are in proprietary format that can only be analyzed and exported using the proprietary software, and the license is such that only 10 people can use the software at once.
The bean counters in the university aren't going to cough up whatever Zeiss wants for an unlimited use license, and Zeiss isn't going to expand the license without trying to squeeze even more cash from the university. In either case, demand for the microscope would be exactly the same, only now researchers are setting alarms for 3am just to export a damn file.
That really sounds like a scenario where adversarial interoperability should be applied. Maybe build a service for queueing, processing and exporting to a mail/ftp or something like that.
Bizarrely, there's no good word for "pertaining to a country". The likely preferred option "national" is subject to a similar objection ("It gets even worse when said foreign country isn't a nation!"--not all countries are nation-states, and we have more than one salient example in the anglosphere!), and "state" has the unfortunate property of meaning something very different to an American.
And interestingly, government is not that clear either.
In Hungarian, for example, we use kormány to mean a mix of government, administration and cabinet, but mostly cabinet. Still it's usually translated to and from "government". But in English government is a very broad word that basically means all the tax funded institutions, not just the ministers. We rather call that "the state". For example in Hungarian nobody would say we have "government-funded" education or healthcare, rather we have "state-funded" ones. But in English "state" is very overloaded with many senses, so "government" took its place. It used to be strange to my ear in American movies when I knew less about the system, e.g. really the government is trying to find you? Like ministers and stuff?
"National" is a weird word in English, because it doesn't typically mean "pertaining to the entire nation" but more like "pertaining to the entire country". I think it's usually the proper term. It translates to "country-al" in the other languages I know.
That said, I don't know about the UK. If a Londoner talks about the "national level", is that England or the UK?
Oh damn I'm wrong and starting to see your point. Eg in German, "land" refers specifically to the federal state and not the federation. You need to use bundessomethingsomething to address all of Germany. Weird stuff!
EDIT suddenly I realize how weird a name the UN has. There's not really any proper nation states left in the word. Bhutan maybe?
I have no idea, but I like to think that it would've been the United Countries but then Scotland would've wanted a seat.
The name of the United Nations is an artifact of WWII - that was the name chosen by the alliance on 1 January 1942, just after the US entered the war, to describe their now-common cause. Given the wide variety of regimes fighting on the same side [1] and the common ideological basis of the combatant countries, "nations" and "brotherhood of nations" style of nationalism were an umbrella everyone could get behind while still having an appropriate amount of emotional oomph.
Dealing with large institutions can be even more difficult than governments!
We recently awarded some grants to people for them to work with an open source scientific package we've been developing.
One of the groups actually gave the money back because it was so hard to get their University to deal with them being awarded money, it wasn't worth it for the amount involved.
I agree that it is maddening. The same thing happens when purchasing hardware. Companies that do B2B transactions don't always support billing to myriad small entities within a single-named organization with a single purchasing department.
There are ways in which it makes sense. The company generally wants to interact with a legal entity, not a research group.
A hybrid approach, that happens occasionally at the University of Washington, is that a department negotiates a discounted license for a software license and then opens the license agreement to broader swaths of the university.
When I did my PhD, we just created a lab website on it's own domain and applied for a Google apps for education account for that domain and got it. That's been our labs main collaboration tool ever since and it's been six years now.
There's also many different IT departments on a campus in my experience. I've never worked in a physics department that interacts with campus IT. It's either great or terrible.
