U.S. Asked to Put Purchasing Power to Good Use

James Love writes "Today Ralph Nader and I wrote U.S. Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels to ask the federal government to use its power as a big consumer to address competition issues in the market for PC client software. These are some of the practices we want OMB to examine: OMB is asked to provide information on federal expenditures for Microsoft products, determine if a software "monoculture" makes the federal government more vulnerable to computer viruses or unauthorized access to federal computers, and to consider a number of strategies to use the US government's purchasing power to promote competition and make Microsoft behave; OMB is asked to consider if Microsoft should be required (as a matter of procurement policy) to fully disclose the file formats of its office productivity and multimedia programs, so that the data created in such programs could be reliably read by non-Microsoft software; OMB is asked to consider if it should place a cap of the market share for any one vendor of PC client software, and have the size of the cap depend upon Microsoft's willingness to open up its interface information, or port its MS Office products to additional platforms; OMB is also asked to consider if it would be more efficient to buy code for office productivity products (and release into the public domain), rather than spend billions to lease software."

Comments

Parent has a point!

[browser_war_pow]

You all should get out of your left wing biases for a second to realize that Nader isn't well respected in many circles. He is reviled as a Socialist nutcase by the Right and Libertarians at a minimum as a general rule consider him to be a clueless luddite (hmm isn't that being redundant?)

As much as you all don't want to hear it, Jerry Falwell would be taken more seriously by the current elected government if he proposed this. You need to send a messenger that will be respected by the recipient when dealing with politics. The best person actually to make the case for Linux is Robert Bork. He has come out against Microsoft (in support of the anti-trust case no less) and if he were to tell Bush that Star Office is better, Bush would probably listen.

Remember people, Bush and his people decide WHERE the money will be spent, Congress merely allocates it. If Bush wants to, he can tell the entire federal bureacracy to sign no new contracts and to not renew any contracts with companies like Microsoft and use only OpenOffice.