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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."
"Slowly I'm forgetting why I felt that way. "
Must be all the dope you've been smoking. Longterm drug abuse fucks up your short term memory, mate.
That's why I support our president and I proudly support the War on Ter^H^H^ Drugs!
(I just wish they'd be honest about it, and call it "The War on Drug Smoking Hippies!")
what a load of utter rubbish this anti-ms stuff is.
microsoft uses smart business theorys and you cry and whimper and call it "anti-trust" (since when was out-smarting someone illegal ? note - thats the neat name some fuckwit gave it because they can't handle reality)
microsoft outsmarts the rest of you and because you can do no better yourself, you cry and make it out like microsoft must have it's own proprietory software formats (which it created through being intelligent and having very good business practises ) forced open for all of you to steal.
you americans go on and On about the "american dream" and yet when somebody (aka Bill Gates) actually gets his dream, you all critisise him for it, and continously plug holes in his works.
Leave the man alone, you dumb fucking idiots
out-smarting you is not a crime.
- people only moan when someone is in power and uses that power how they see fit.
they deserve that right, for they created that right when they created that monopoly out of business intelligence.
this anti-ms behaviour is all a load of bullshit hidden under some (I'm too lame to handle reality)
vail. the thing is, you know it too.
thats what makes it hurt so much.
no matter what other bullshit reasons you mask the truth with.
simple fact is, you can't handle being outsmarted.
get a life.
I agree. Neither the United States government nor any serious company can afford to deal with implementing an operating system that greets you with a $ prompt or some weirdo word processor that looks like Word, but can't handle basic tables. Linux is great for Geeks, but there is a real world out there where people simply don't care about kernels and crontabs.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Yeah, girls are gross!
Like it matters.