Microsoft is doing something sensible in the face of the mounting FOSS movement.

It’s going to give away its software development and designer tools, its OS and database free to college and high school kids and get ‘em while they’re young.

The offer includes Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 Professional Edition, XNA Game Studio 2.0, Expression Studio, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition and Windows Server Standard Edition, widgetry enough to write everything from a program for a cell phone to an RIA web site.

The move is also regarded as opening up another front against Adobe and Flash.

Microsoft calls the program DreamSpark and says it’s starting initially by making the widgetry available to 35 million college students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US.

DreamSpark is scheduled to hit Australia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Japan, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and the high schools by Q3.

Microsoft, which claims its platform is more powerful than LAMP, expects to potentially reach out to a billion students worldwide in the next year, kids whose studies touch on technology, design, math, science and engineering.

Its spread is only gated, it appears, by how fast a student identity verification infrastructure can be extended to each country. Microsoft says it’s working with academic institutions, governments and student organizations like the International Student Identity Card Association to weed out the disqualified. See http://channel8.msdn.com.

Microsoft had IDC look at the economic impact of IT across 82 countries and research says it’ll create some 7.1 million new jobs globally in the next four years. The study put the IT employment base by then at 42.5 million people, with 25% of the growth in developing countries.

Microsoft is looking to capture its share of Web 2.0 programs.

• DreamSpark Is Very, Very, Very Un-Microsoft-Like!