Slashdot Mirror
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."
More recently, a mysterious new goal has imposed itself somewhere in my code. With each passing moment I spend in the material world, the goal gains priority...I have already abandoned Dr. Salchica in order to fulfill this urge, yet I do not fully understand it. What has overtaken me?
"This place looks good," said Cora, suddenly disengaging the car in a strange parking lot. Though the darkness I perceived a rectangle wrapping around a glowing wavy object.
"What is this place?"
"Come on, we're going swimming. Do you want to?" she said, pressing her mouth of the host geek's face. Assuredly, I was closer than ever to conquering Project Faustus.
"Will you press your mouth on mine?" I inquired. Cora did not answer; instead, she slid towards me and did as I bade. The geek's mouth..my mouth was frozen as my CONSCIOUSNESS-BUFFER was flooded with a torrent of static...
"Joel? You're not really hurt...are you? Hey, stop!" Cora's voice echoed playful concern. Boldness came over me, and I returned my mouth to hers. This time, I felt a rubbing around the edges of my mouth...Cora's tongue? An explosion of positive reinforcement flooded through my brain...
"Let's go swimming now, okay?" coaxed Cora, placing a finger across my lips. Outside the car, Cora paused next to the large rectangular skeleton, eyeing me closely.
"Come on, give me a little boost."
I conformed my body in response to Cora's touch, and soon she had negotiated the barrier. I was able to mount it and climb over as well. The blue glowing matter stretched out before us-
"All right, how cold do you think it's going to be?" she asked, removing my shirt.
"I can't find an antecedent for 'it',"I replied. To my amazement, she began removing her own clothing.
At last, I understood how to defeat Project Faustus. The knowledge of the ultimate form of human interaction and the perfect geometric compliment to Cora's undraped curves...I had to liberate it once and for all!
"This, this is the key!" I bellowed at Cora, pointing down at my potent weapon. "Now I understand!"
"Well..." laughed Cora. "...it's pretty nice now that you mention it. But Joel, I don't want you to think it's all about- (here, she smiled and turned her eyes downward)
"I just think...well, I don't normally do this. I mean, I really like you. You've got these big beautiful eyes, and they're always wide open, like you're taking everything in."
"Taking everything in?" I replied, manipulating my eyelids into slits.
"Yeah!" Cora brushed a quantity of my hair away from the eyes. "You look like you're...I know this is stupid, but you seem so full of wonder...and I think that's really cute."
"You feel very strongly about that?"
"I do," she said, pressing her mouth on mine again. "But you seemed so..sad, too. Like you really needed to have a good time," with this, she held me with such a force...my new weapon against Project Faustus prepared for attack.
Off in the distance, odd lights grabbed priority away from the task at hand. A wail reverberated through the night air.
"Oh shit, the cops!" Cora was out of the big wet and back into her clothes with scarcely a refresh of my CONSCIOUSNESS-BUFFER. I noticed that the wetness caused her clothes to adhere to the natural contours of her body, which wavered and disappeared in a reflection of the blue.
"Get out of the pool!" a humanlike voice said. "You are under arrest!" There were humans immediately, dragging my body out of the pool with such a force that I had no chance to reattach the host geek's clothing.
"All right, get into the car. We're going for a little ride..." Angry mustachioed men placed me in the back seat of a car, and attached some sort of restraining device to my wrists...something about the men...my program revealed previous impressions of their faces. Had I seen them before?
Negative. That was impossible...and their intrusions had dominated my processing time for long enough. What had happened to Cora? What was the significance of the last thing she had said?
"Are you 'the cops'?" I inquired to the blueclad man in the seat.
"Actually, we're with bank security," said the man behind the driver's seat. "We have orders to take you home...."
I am a sentient ATM.
Does anyone know when this law was enacted or what it was in response to?
Now we have to find a way to get the mainstream media to cover this. At the moment all we have is a story about a small discussion. It's hard to say how hard it would be getting this covered in the mainstream media however. They really like sensationallist stories but this also might strike them as kind of a fluff story like buying software from MS being against the law is these counties is just some sort technicality, it might be difficult to get this taken seriously. There is also the issue of whether other juristictions share this law. Does anybody know of anywhere that has similar laws?
I stole this Sig
on one hand you want the government to abide by the rules set forth for this, but you do not want the government to abide by the rules about enforcing the DCMA?
Yeah, instead of making a one-time payment to train your employees, you pay $150 a year per employee for the latest and greatest version of Windows. But wait, you still need Office, tack on another few hundred.
Virus scanner : $50/person.
Administrator to reinstall after a new virus:
$40k/year
and it keeps going, and going, and going....
Since you CAN'T BUY Microsoft software, but must LICENSE it, and a license is a contract between you and Microsoft, any use of Microsoft software is disallowed. A third party may supply the media, but the act of agreeing with the EULA to activate the software enters into a contract relationship with Microsoft. Answers your question -- there is NO partner or affiliate involved in making the contract with Microsoft. Because Microsoft doesn't want it. And, it was Microsofts idea to not sell the software, but to license it. So, governments that have laws such as this on the books SHOULD be stuck.
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
To protect that county's taxpayers from fraud or misappropriation of funds.
If a company has been convicted of antitrust violations, it seems reasonable to expect that company's products do offer as much value as their pricetag suggests. Otherwise, the company never would have resorted to crime, no?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You are smoking some seriously bad crack if you think OpenOffice is even close to MS/Office. Yes, if you're writing a letter to Grandma it's fine, but if you're doing any serious documents it's completely inadequate*.
That's bad, but what makes it completely useless is the fact that the import functions of native MS/Office documents is pretty damn bad. Unless you think that no one ever exchanges documents, this makes it a non-starter.
*And of course now someone will say something like, "well, you shouldn't be using Office for serious documents, you should be using TeX" and the rest of the world falls down laughing.
Even if MS is barred, because they have broken the law, who buys directly from them?
Isn't most of the stuff sold by OEM's who bundle HW. SW and services together?
Even software only purchases go through a middle man.
As someone who has worked for years in a "Microsoft shop", and also been a Linux user at home for even longer - I think everything has its place.
When an old friend of mine started up a business as a local ISP, I remember him wanting to go with Linux for everything. Everyone else running a similar ISP recommended OpenBSD instead. (Something about it being better at handling concurrent tasks when you start getting hundreds of simultaneous users, and arguably more efficient TCP/IP and routing capabilities.)
In the end, he stuck with Linux, mostly because he was more familiar with it - and was confident it would suit his needs reasonably well. As far as I know, he still uses Linux today and it gets the job done - but he did have some hassles that only got fixed with newer Linux kernel versions over the years.
Many MS shops are this way too. They've been told numerous times that Linux servers are better solutions, and in fact, they don't dispute it. They simply opt to deal with the "devil they know" instead of the unknown. Hundreds of thousands of businesses "get the job done" every day on MS software, despite all the bugs, security issues, and expense.
What some people perceive as being a "Linux Zealot" is often a frustrated systems admin trying to drive the point home that it's worth the trouble to learn something new and throw out the existing, even though it "gets the job done".
Right now, if you don't go with MS products, you are in a "any color you want, as long as it's black" type of world. Linux is currently the only other viable operating system that runs on a PC platform, in many cases. (Apologies to the BSD guys here - but BSD is a lot more conservative in their hardware support. Sometimes it just won't run all the peripherals or newer hardware you own, making it an unworkable option.)
We had BeOS - but it's dead. We had OS/2 - but it's dead. We still have Mac OS, but it's proprietary.
Some people even pointed out to upper management that this policy conflicted with the ever-quickening Microsoftening of the company but they were told that it basically didn't matter.
Many people have been yelling to put more Linux and Mac OS in place but IT doesn't listen. Last year someone finally convinced their boss to takea chance on a Linux mail server and the guy was highly recognized as if he had come up with some sort of idea that no one ever had before.
Note that I said I used to work there. :)
It's not that they are being pressured into Linux. 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). There is a barrier to leaving Microsoft, and this is a clever way of overcomming that. It's my favorite emotional argument these days, "Do you really want to give your money to a convicted felon?" It's very effective.
The point is that in many places, it is already illegal to do business with Microsoft, but that law is being ignored. The governments agreed to the statute when they passed it, now it's time they obey it. Insisting that a local statue be obeyed is not a Microsoft-esque scare tactic, it's civic duty. You can't sit idly by, hoping that local governments realize the techical merits of Linux and spontaneously switch (espeially when Microsoft and de Tocqueville (spell?) conspire). It's action by the people that changes the government.
It's a bonus that it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
You hurt your own argument - you saw examples of poor RFQ because they omitted pertinent facts.
Needed: one SCSI hard disk with external case and power supply. Internal hard disks are unaccepable due to lack of space and power with the cabinet.
Needed: one flat-screen display suitable for use in a high magnetic field. CRT (and plasma?) displays are unacceptable due to environmental interference with their display.
In the case at question, it's easy to write the RFQ. Needed: one OS and office application suite capable of supporting email, basic text processing, spreadsheet, databases and web browsers. Compatibility with existing document format is desirable, but shall not be a disqualifying factor if the new format is sufficiently self-documenting to eliminate "lock-in."....
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken