The Vrije Universiteit should not be confused with the University of Amsterdam. The name is often abbrevated as VU. It is the university of the Vereniging voor Christelijk Wetenschappelijk Onderwijs (Association for Christian Scientific Education).
The association was founded in 1880, and headed by Abraham Kuyper, as the first protestant university. Vrije Universiteit literally means Free University to signify freedom from government and church. The education itself however, is not free of cost; like all accredited universities in The Netherlands students pay a (government determined) fee, while students receive a student loan from government as well.
About 17,000 students (2004) attend the university, with 2,200 scientific employees, and 1,600 non-scientific employees.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum is a professor of computer science at the faculty of "Exact" sciences that comprises the fields physics, chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, and pharmacy. He is the author of the famous book Computer Networks.
The University's commitment to be inspiring, innovative and involved is reflected in its IT policies.
The FreeUniversity's IT team was tasked with giving a large amount of end-users access to many different applications.
The FreeUniversity was packaging and delivering applications via electronic software delivery (ESD), however because of the many variables IT had to consider – including whether the applications would conflict once installed – it took at least 3-5 days just to package a single application.
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