Monopolists Dropped Off At The County Line

An anonymous reader submits: "In this discussion thread members of PLUG (Phoenix Linux Users Group) may have come up with a way to pressure governmental agencies to switch to software other than that from Microsoft. County purchasing policies in Maricopa County, AZ prohibit purchasing from companies or persons convicted under state or federal antitrust statutes. At least one other county, Coconino, that I have checked so far has similar requirements. I think that it's time to make the government follow their own rules and stop spending any more money with criminals."

Comments

Are they serious?

[Clue4All]

In this discussion thread members of PLUG (Phoenix Linux Users Group) may have come up with a way to pressure governmental agencies to switch to software other than that from Microsoft.

How about based on technical merits, does that count anymore? Does anyone still choose the right tool for the job or is everyone a zealot these days? Not that I really need to ask after the uprising over the use of BitKeeper by Linus...

Re:Are they serious?

[agentZ]

Many people, myself included, believe that for many governmental application, open source products are superior to closed source products, particularly those sold by Microsoft. I won't dive deeply into the arguments, but governments require open access to their data for all time; they shouldn't be forced to buy expensive upgrades from a single vendor because the vendor has decided to change the file format.

That being said, we're not going to convince members of governments on technical merits. They don't understand technical issues, nor should they. We charge them with governing the people, not with hacking around with e-mail servers. In order to talk to these people, we have to speak a language that they understand; the language of laws and regulations.

If we want the government to do something for us, we have to speak their language.

Re:Are they serious?

[j-beda]

How about based on technical merits, does that count anymore?

Acutally, laws such as this one are designed to avoid dealing with companies and people who have shown themselves to be untrustworthy, which is a fairly good way of avoiding poor purchasing decisions, regardless of the "technical merits".

Sure, you want to check out the quality of the stuff you buy, but it is generally easier to just avoid the stuff sold by crooks, and only do your checking of products from reputable dealers.

Re:Are they serious?

[MrResistor]

It is the government's duty, in the case of anti-trust violations, to take action which will restore competition to the effected market. The easiest way to do this is to support companies that compete with the monopolist. Personally, I don't care if they pick Apple, Sun, Linux, BSD, or even FreeDOS, as long as they don't pick Microsoft, a convicted monopolist. That is, after all, exactly what the law states, and any of those choices would acheive the desired result of increasing/enabling competition in those markets which Microsoft currently dominates.

Also, technical merits? Are you honestly contending that there is a situation where you would choose a Microsoft solution over everything else based solely on technical merits? What technical merits would you base that decision on? In this situation (government IT) having an open document standard accesible in perpetuity has much more technical merit than being able to edit the current flavor of MS Word document format without breaking obscure and seldom used formatting, to counter the most common example. Hell, just accesible in perpetuity would be fine, but Microsoft has proven unwilling to provide even that. It is not the governments responsibility to accept information in whatever form the public wants to give it to them, it is the publics responsibility to shoehorn that information into the form the government accepts. That is why I have to use a form 1040 instead of just jotting down my income and number of dependents on any old scrap of paper, or just sending them a copy of the spreadsheet I use to keep track of my finances.

Regardless, technical merits are NEVER the sole basis of such a decision, and often they are not even a particularly important part. Costs are a big part of it, as are, especially in a government situation, political considerations such as supporting local businesses and thus maintaining the local economy. Momentum also plays a part, as organizations are more likely to simply upgrade what they have, for better or worse, than start over from scratch, or if they are starting from scratch they will generally choose a technology which an important member of the organization is most familiar with, whether or not that person is actually qualified to be making such a recomendation.

I feel that there are any number of vendors, both open and closed source, who are better suited to the requirements of government IT than Microsoft; namely security and long term information access. This law is simply the kick in the pants necessary to force this particular body to consider those other solutions. Naturally, I would prefer that my government choose open source solutions, as I believe that investment in open source maximizes the value of my tax dollars, but other choices would certainly be acceptable.

Drunk drivers should not drive busses, embezzlers should not be appointed to the treasury, child pornographers should not work at schools, and abusive monopolists should not be rewarded with government contracts.

Skeptical

[delphin42]

I seriously doubt this will encourage adoption of Linux in situations where it would not otherwise be used. It is far more likely, unfortunate as it may be, that the statute will be ignored or even changed. Microsoft is seen as a necessary part of doing business, and that isn't likely to change significantly any time soon.

HA!

[TweeKinDaBahx]

Guess that means we'll have to start be clearing out all the criminals already in the Gov't starting from the top with W. and moving on down to the janitor in your local elementary school.

Realistically, No of this happens, or is enforced. Some people with criminal records are decent people, who made a mistake. Others, well... should be forced to watch network tv all day while picking up garbage (that's 4 u dAAn).

Get over yourselves. There are probably pleanty of criminals in the OSS scene. I suppose next you'll be saying only US citizens between the ages of 21-39 will be able to write kernel code.

Everytime shit like this comes off, it pisses me off...

Purchasing policies are not set in stone

[marian]

The people who have to deal with them know exactly how to use them to best result. In a former life when I was working for a government agency and was responsible for ordering computer hardware/software, I had to know how to file an RFQ (request for quotation) so that only the single vendor I had already picked as the best source could meet the requirements. It's not hard to do. If they want to use specific products because it's what they're used to, or think they're the best solution, they will use them.

The way to change this is to rewrite the purchasing policies so that they have clear definitions that aren't subject to interpretation, with no loopholes. But it IS government we're talking about here, remember?

I agree

[unformed]

If the government can't spend any more money with criminals, the DEA would have to stop having undercover drug agents giving money to coke dealers, and hence would stop funding terrorism, and hence result in heightened national security.

Woohoo!

You wouldn't be bitter

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ran linux. It is a superior OS, and is far better than the Windows shit that you run.

Yeah you've come to the shocking conclusion that people at slashdot are full of shit. The mods have a very nice and selective "We see what we want to see" attitude. Ever wonder how come you never see a SINGLE intelligent rebutal of the linux zealotry here? Its no accident.

Bravo, but...

[aquarian]

This seems great at first glance, but I can think of a few caveats. How long does the ban last? Companies continually reinvent themselves, and the marketplace itself changes completely every few years.

So while this sounds good when applied to Microsoft, what about telecommunications companies? Will the government have to shut off all their phones, because no one is clean enough to supply the service? How about aerospace and defense? Motor vehicles?

The need to punish bad behavior must be balanced with the taxpayers' getting value for their dollar. There are good (and free!) alternatives to Microsoft software, but not everything else.

Is pressuring the right way?

[FortKnox]

a way to pressure governmental agencies to switch to software other than that from Microsoft

Isn't "pressuring people to do things" what got MS into trouble in the first place? Do you want linux pressured onto people? Wouldn't you rather they made the choice on better terms?

Yeah, and get ready....

[Anonymous Coward]

for your county govt to grind to a halt. Anyone think of the ramifications of a sudden shift from MS to an alternative OS?

1) Hundreds of COTS and Vendor developed Windows apps will need to be replaced or re-written costing taxpayers more money.

2) User re-training costing taxpayers more money.

3) New vendors for tech support of new apps and OS, re-training or replacing county tech support personnel costing taxpayers more money.

Ask the average taxpayer what they think about MS monopoly and they will say they don't care. They have an OS that supports all the apps they use, and they don't give a flying fig that they are being prosecuted. Now tell them that their local govt will become slower and less responsive than it already is due to the fact that all of the kinks will have to be worked out with interoperability, useabilty, installation, and training due to the switch, on top of which taxes will need to be raised to pay for it, and they will show up at your doorstep with pitchforks and torches.

Re:Yeah, and get ready....

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what they have already ground to a halt. HA.

Honestly do you think that it would. Most people don't even need word processor. Construction crews? For those that do, Open office would more than suffice IN MOST cases. From what I've seen most systems that do billing etc rely on AS/400 or other Unix like systems to do their work.

Re:rules?

[gorf]

Yes, and?

There are sensible laws (the Government not doing business with convicted persons or companies) and then there are unjust laws (not allowing me to view a DVD I bought without agreeing to additional agreements [EULAs], even though I'm not breaking copyright law). It's perfectly valid to complain.

And by the way, the Government don't enforce the DMCA, the entities who reckon they've lost money do.

Nice try

[T.E.D.]

It looks like those policies just prevent Microsoft from being a contractor to the county. They don't prevent some other contractor from using Microsoft's software in their bids, nor do they prevent the county from purchasing Wintel boxes from someone like Gateway.

Serious technical merits

[DoctorFrog]

From what I've seen of the thread so far it would appear that they're mostly talking about server-side software. Linux desktop may still be arguable (and I mean exactly that - arguable), but Linux for servers is technically way ahead from what I read almost anywhere but at MicroSoft itself and its closely allied sites.

As the initial post on the PLUG group said, > [Is there any technology that is Microsoft exclusive? I believe there are sites that explain how to replace Exchange Server completely using Linux/OSS; and SQL Server is replaceable with mySQL; IIS & ASP is replaceable with Apache & PHP, right?]

If using this law simply gets Maricopa County to examine the software on the merits as opposed to blindly following the nobody-ever-got-fired-for-choosing-MS meme, that will be a victory for OSS right there.

Maricopa County

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

Maricopa County contains the city of Phoenix, among others. Hardly podunk.

Re:ummm

[Phil Hands]

Well since you don't buy Free Software from the developers, you only need to determine if the people selling you support, and/or the CDs are criminals, so there is no problem.

look over the pond

[XavierXeon]

many gov's in europe and asia are just doing what you are bitching about ! they run more and more stuff on linux servers and/or workstations. why should this not be possible in the states ? e.g. the software which counts the votes in the next german election will be linux powered. (many of you probably think europeans are nuts, but i don"t care)

Re:shouldn't it start from the top?

[freek_daddy]

Any source for any of this? Not that I don't believe they're plausable figures, but I never heard of "Congressional immunity" as relates to drunk driving.

Be careful

[whoppers]

I'm all for open source, but the gov't offices do need time to convert to open source. Everyone is heading in this direction slowly. The more application vendors that support linux, the more users that will move over.

Just my $.02

Unconstitutional? Hardly

[DoctorFrog]

It doesn't make any difference what MS has been charged with or convicted of, because they haven't been sentenced. No court has told microsoft that they can't sell their product anymore, so why should a county not be allowed to buy from them?

It's Maricopa County's own policy which states that they're not allowed to buy from MicroSoft, or any other company following a federal conviction for unethical business practices. Nobody's picking on the Maricopa County comptroller and forcing them to do something against their wishes; residents of the county are trying to get their own local government to follow its own stated policy.

Local Residents Urge Local Government to Follow Local Government Policy.

Yes, I suppose it does sound absurd, at that - it wouldn't look out of place in the Onion, anyway.

They understand the language of money as well

[rector]

Besides the language of laws, the members of the government understand one more language-the language of money. Cosidering possible alternatives to Microsoft products, they may well find out that additional personell training, convertion of existing documents and databases (convertors rearly save visual representation of documents, so manual alterations may be needed) and other linked expenses may cost more than 5-year upgrade of all Microsoft software they use.

Unconstitutional? no... Useless? yes.

[Ted_Green]

The law is a county law and perfectly legitimate. Bare in mind "government" just doesn't mean the Government of the United States of America, nor does it merly mean the Government of the State of ___. It also applies to even smaller divisions of people, even to the point of town ordinances. Some aren't legally binding as the next level up (city or state or national or whatever) laws supercede them.

In this case the government (the local government) *has* made rules about spending money on Microsoft products, that is to say, products that are produced by a company convicted of an anti-trust violation.

Same with any other company.

The law is constitutional (though could be challenged) as there is nothing unconstitutional about setting forth laws governing purchasing requirements.

Now of course, this is a single county, and the law is probably quite old, heralding from the Rockefeller days (total shot in the dark, just an unfounded assumption) Possibly it's not paid attention to anymore. Still it is a law, and if enough people in that county bring it to attention the county will either follow it, or revoke it.

But again, it's a single county. And quite possibly it might only mean that one can't buy products from Microsoft (not retailers) which makes it a moot point anyways. (I haven't read the law, as I can't access it). Either way it still won't have much effect on the rest of the world.

Re:shouldn't it start from the top?

[Rupert]

Any convictions? That should be what matters.

LINUX is NOT ready for this

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not the way to go about getting people to adopt linux. Regardless of what you will say, there are somethings you just can't do on linux. And some things that you can do, you have to make do with crappy software, frankly. Open source does not necessarily mean quality. Forcing these counties to use Linux is wrong and will only make the people that make the decisions less linux friendly. They will just end up changing the law to allow them to buy MS.

On another thread, all of the linux desktops lack the polish they need to really succeed in the business world. They are designed by the average programming Joe, and it shows. They look like crap. You should not have to fuck with the OS or X to make it render anti-aliased text, for example.

And for all the stories about how someone's 6 year old child can sit down at a linux computer and start recompiling the kernel in 10 minutes, there are 5000 times as many about mainstream people that have given linux a chance and found it to be crude. Linux may have a Ferrari engine and frame, but it has the body of a Pinto, and whether you want to admit it or not, you know that's all that matters to the masses. The success of Windows is that when people sit down at their computers, it just works, well minus the occaisional BSOD (which is not nearly as common as people make them out to be, especially with Windows XP.) You don't have to recompile anything, you don't have to fuck with configuration scripts, it just works. And then while it's working, it looks good. The interface has thousands of hours of refinement and usability studies behind it. It works, it looks good, that's why people like it.

And no one in the public gives a damn whether or not Microsoft is crushing other companies by including Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player in their operating system. They like it. They like the fact that Internet Explorer has the continuity of interface and user experience that only integration can bring. They like those proprietary Internet Explorer extensions to HTML because it makes their web pages look better, and they don't even know it.

They like Windows Media Player because they put their cd in and it start playing. They like it because they can click one button and it rips the cd with speed and effienciency. They like it because that same program can manage all of their media.

For the average user, the computing experience is all about complexity, and the desire to reduce that complexity as much as possible. People don't care that with linux you can configure the kernel to your every whim. They would prefer that option to be left out if it would mean that when they put their kid's game in there it works out of the box.

And that is why linux will always be a niche operating system. It cannot succeed in the mainstream because it is too good at what it does. Linux is an operating system created by programmers for programmers and people know how their computer works. It is not, nor will it ever be for Betty Sue down at the DMV, unless somebody gets a clue and focuses on the interface.

You're comparing Apples and Oranges

[Anonymous Coward]

> conviction of antitrust statutes causes your
> company to cease to exist
If that's what was actually being talked about, it'd still be what we should do. But what's actually going on is something different; see below.

Here's why I think it would be the right thing to do. Look at what Arthur Anderson got away with because they weren't forced out of existance: multiple judgements, spanning many years, some of the largest in history (seeking $600 million in fines for AZ Baptist Foundation anyone?), finally resulting in Enron, where public opinion finally got them turned into a shell of their former corporation.

> If you are convicted of a felony, the minimu[m]
> sentence is death by lethal injection?
Repeat after me:

Companies are not natural persons.

And even if they were natural persons, they deserve to suffer the same fate as 68% of the people on Death Row. How many corporations have been executed in the last 100 years? Go ahead, I'm waiting. I can read you off a huge list of natural persons who've had their lives snuffed out by the state. Are you implying that corporations are more moral than the people they make up??? Or something even more ludicrous?

Capital punishment is not even on the same level as revoking a company's charter. And it's definitely not the same as barring them from selling to government agencies in a county (or even a country for that matter). Which is what's being recommended. The two are not even remotely close.

If a government group/agency/regional authority stops buying your products, you still have the whole rest of the world, and all of the private world to sell to. And if your products are strong enough, why do you need to be on government dole anyways?

Now it'd be interesting if in companies convicted of criminal activities, the CEO and board of directors were subjected to lethal injection. That would clean up a lot of shoddy business practices and fraud in a hurry.

That's a solution that's got a lot to recommend it, actually....

If you disband a company, and sell off it's assets, and pay off the stockholders, who actually got hurt?

Yes, some people are out of business, but if the need remains for those services, those people A) will form a new company, or B) get hired by the former companies competitors. If there are no competitors, you've just cleared the field for anyone (hopefully two or three) new companies to come in and provide services.

-- Ender, Duke_of_URL

Slashdot Linux bashing

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone else noticed that the amount of Linux/OSS bashing on /. has increased a lot lately?

This seems really weird to me. Are people coming here just to bash OSS? What happened to all the intelligent, free-thinking conversation?

/. seems to be flooded by static these days. If these people can't handle us "zealots" why don't they get their new somewhere else? Are they getting paid derail discussions by asserting half-truths? What's the incentive? Do they just post so that others will waste time posting proof they're wrong?

MS has been convicted.
This law is constitutional. (moron)
Computers do work without MS software.
There's no such thing a "congressional immunity"
Linux is easy to use, just hard to configure.
Anything else I missed?

If they don't want their freedom, fine. I'll keep mine thanks.

Government

[Anonymous Coward]

I happen to work for the gov't, not in Maricopa County (although I'd love to be living in Phoenix) and we use a handful of OS's for security reasons. We use Windows NT, Novell, Unix, our email server is Notes, and that is just the ones I use daily.

I don't know if I agree or disagree with this "law", but using only one IMHO is stupid. In addition to that, this has nothing to do with Microsoft vs. Open Source. This is about ethics, morals, and legalities. Is it legal to run microsoft? Sure. Is it morally and ethically right? Probably not for all you slashdotters. Just because one small portion of the US has a law that could potentially apply to support your moral and ethical views doesn't mean that it is illegal as well.

Questionable...

[Anonymous Coward]

Though I agree the government shouldn't be doing business with criminals (must resist long rant on this subject), is it right to force people away from micro$oft? Seems no better than the tatics m$ uses to force people to use their OS. Shouldn't the laws be engineered to accomodate choice rather than forcing options in the other direction?

Re:rules?

[jejones]

Well, yes, just as in the 50s and 60s there were people who wanted laws against murder enforced but didn't think much of laws imposing, say, segregation. I don't think the implication of hypocrisy is valid.

Re:WakeUp Linux Zealots

[BigBir3d]

That is one big kernel!

Windowmaker works fine, it is nice and small. You don't need KDE or Gnome to be useful in a GUI environment.

Re:It's not pressure, it's civic duty.

[gad_zuki!]

They could go to Mac, BSD, or Linux (this list would be longer, but OS/2 and Be OS are not options...I wonder why).

Mac may not be an option either. Apple may be very hesitant on taking advantage of these laws just in case MS decides to stop shipping new versions of Office/IE for them. Abusive monopoly and all that.

Then again Apple's new ad campaign is very anti-MS. I'm sure they have to walk some fine line to not upset the folks at Redmond too much, while Redmond walks the fine line pretending not to be a monopoly.