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

Re:no.

[TweeKinDaBahx]

on top of that, why should M$ make it's patented technologie savailible to the public? The company is entitled to make money for thier trouble, and if all thier code was made availible it would change their entire business strategy. The Justice dept. knows this, and will most likely side with M$ on this particular issue.

Re:Voting for Nader

[gaj]

ummm

one what?

So Much For Slashdot

[thelizman]

You hit the nail on the head.

And yet, Slashdot's mods already knocked this down to a flamebait. God help if anyone exposes the truth about leftist icons like Nader, but ad hominem attack against Bush will easily garner a troll a +5 Funny. No wonder people flee to K5 in droves.

Re:So Much For Slashdot

[toupsie]

I know the feeling. If I ever post something that goes against Anti-MS crowd, Nader or environmentalist scientists like Sting and Bono, the -1 Flamebait/Troll mods get thrown left and right at the post. That's the problem with Slashdot, if you disagree with "Status Quo" it described as Flamebait/Troll. So much for intellectual integrity.

Re:Open Source Making Government Inroads

[ckaminski]

I take issue with your assertion that you've been using NT 3.5 since 1993. IIRC, it didn't release until late 1994. But I'll forgive you such a minor point.

Whatever happened to Windows 2000, arguably the best OS Microsoft has yet to release (just my humble opinion). I can assure you that Office 97, Fp 2K and just about every other Microsoft product works just fine on 2K.

And let's just face it, any user who cannot properly navigate Network Neighborhood needs to go back to using their calculators, and stop wasting our time.

-Chris

Re:Open Source Making Government Inroads

[saden1]

I couldn't get Win 2K running on my home machine without it crashing once per hour.