Assuming Amazon paid them money for the IP addresses (which are now allocated for EC2 use) it's kind of a shame.

A more forward-thinking deal would have bartered for, say, a lifetime allocation of Amazon Web Services credit.

For the past 5-10 years timeshare computing has grown in popularity again, this time on third-parties' computers. Given this reality and the changes it implies for MITnet -- lots of students and staff spin up "a server" to do experiments that they don't want to host on local physical machines -- it would have been smart for MIT to negotiate some perpetual timeshare credit with Amazon rather than just straight-up cash.

Then (my theory continues) MIT could have allotted some of its information-processing credit for research use and some for student use. They could have given each student a basic quota with the vendor, and reserved some additional information-processing for student projects.

And instead of hiring some full-time staffer to coordinate the distribution of timeshare credit to worthy projects ("I need 100 hours of EC2 c4.large for my thesis") they could have done something really clever and asked students themselves to divvy up the credit via an advisory organization of technically minded folks.

Imagine that -- MIT could have helped support some kind of student information processing board …