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

Hey Ralphy boy....

[Anonymous Coward]

Ralph,

Nice job on the letter.

The government has used its purchasing power to force COBOL and ADA on us.

Now its time to use its powers for good and force the file-formats to be open.

Whoo hoo!

Other requests include

[Civil_Disobedient]

OMB is asked to examine whether Microsoft source code should be provided to the general public; OMB also requests that the days be made longer, that marijuana should be legalized, that there should be world peace, and that the Supreme Court should have made him president instead.

Please file this additional document under "D" for Delusional.

You've forgotten.

[JMZero]

The big goal isn't the government using good software, it's hurting MS.

Re:Role of Government

[ftobin]

I don't agree that the government should be in the role of creating software.

Yeah, heaven forbid that some research instituation like the NCSA comes up with another revolutionizing piece of software like Mosaic. Don't lump the government as you do; the research arms of the government great at developing new things.

Re:Nader? Yeah, like they will listen.

[Havokmon]

If Nader declares "Americans should never dress up like Carmen Miranda in public", you'd start seeing fruit salads over every Republican's head.

Hehe that wasn't what I was expecting in the post, and kinda invalidates my argument, BUT, as much as it doesn't seem like people listen to Nader (I don't), I do know this: The squeaky wheel gets the grease. (That sentence inspired by Douglas Adams.)

Whether or not your loudest most obnosious user is correct, management dictates that their gripes will be taken care of, whether you really can or not.

At some point, some of what he says will make sense, and action will be taken (purchase caps on proprietary software is a nifty idea.)