Bill Gates will be announcing a new program called DreamSpark in which Microsoft is planning to give students free access to most of their developer tools. Visual Studio Pro, SQL Server, and Windows Server are among some of the well known tools that will be free to students.

Although there are only 10 countries currently involved in this program expect that more will join sometime this year.

If your a college student and want to take advantage of this offer, you’ll need to head over to Journeyed which is the site that maintains and verifies the database of US students who are eligible for the development tools.

Thanks to the Open Source movement for making this happen. Microsoft is clearly starting to see they need to get back into the game and create a new generation of user/developers who will use their products.