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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."
monopolists should be dropped off on baltic avenue. nobody wants that piece o' crap.
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fight global cooling
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?
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
Note the second link's page doesn't actually say that the contractor must be debarred (prevented from providing services), but only that they may be debarred for a period of up to 3 years. I expect that someone would have to bring this up in a council meeting of some sort to actually have the action taken.
But I'm having a little trouble getting past this URL:
I think if I was on a list hosted at pluglist.mybutt, I would expect it to be about something else besides Linux..
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.
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.
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?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
It's not practical for us to stop using Microsoftware, because it's simply too pervasive and dominant, and the costs and penalties for switching are too high.
What? What do you mean "That's the definition of an abusive monopoly!"? But it's so hard to switch away from Microsoft. We know that's the point, but, uuh, we don't wanna. We'd have to learn stuff! We're civil servants, that's not in our job description. And don't get us started on the long term career risks of being in the same room where an actual decision gets made to switch from the biggest, safest option... [etc, ad nauseum]
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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.
A law set forth in a podunk Arizona county
Yeah, Maricopa is a podunk county. Not much there, considering it's the fourth largest county in the U.S. Oh, and it's the fastest gaining county in the U.S. as well.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
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.
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
Um, not true. The findings of fact and conclusions of law are entered. They have survived appeal. It is only the "sentencing" (the remedy) that is in dispute. Microsoft does indeed stand convicted of violations of the Sherman Act.
I think that it's time to make the government follow their own rules and stop spending any more money with criminals.
29 members of Congress have been accused of spousal abuse.
7 have been arrested for fraud.
19 have been accused of writing bad checks.
3 have been arrested for assault.
71 have credit reports so bad they can't qualify for a credit card.
14 have been arrested on drug-related charges.
8 have been arrested for shoplifting.
21 are current defendants in lawsuits.
And in 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving, but released after they claimed Congressional immunity.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Arthur Andersen LLP has a criminal conviction for obstruction of justice. That's much worse. As of last Saturday, they're out of the auditing business, because the SEC won't accept audits from a felon. All Andersen audit clients must find new auditors immediately. The company will probably go bankrupt. Criminal charges against individual executives may follow.
How about a full re-post of the highlights of the discussion thread for those of us behind extremely restrictive firewalls?
pluglist.mybutt.net is blocked as a sex site here.
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.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
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. :)
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.
Are you smoking something?
This "decent helpdesk" wouldn't need training in Linux as well? Or, would you propose to fire all of the existing, well-trained helpdesk & support techs and hiring Linux hackers? That would really be an intelligent decision: letting a bunch of Linux hax0rs loose or a corporate LAN, replacing their Windows NT/2k Servers with Linux because "it's so much more '|337'" - which brings productivity to a standstill while everyone tries to figure out how to get to their favorite applications? I can imagine the scenario perfectly:
THE PHONECALL OF DOOM!!!!
User1: I need help!! I went to start using EXCEL, and my EXCEL icon, along with WinWord and Access icons are GONE!!! WHERE THE HELL DID MY EXCEL ICON GO TO!?!?!"
HelpDesk: "Oh, well - we're running Linux now (User1 didn't notice, because someone sneakilly installed Linux with a Win9x-looking theme), so you can't run Excel...but we have this |337 replacement for that money-grubbing Bill Gates' closed-source software abortion called MS-Office - it's called StarOff..."
User1: YOU DID WHAT!?!??! YOU JUST DESTROYED MY ABILITY TO WORK!!!! I'M CALLING THE IT DIRECTOR AND YOU'RE LOSING YOUR JOB!!!
HelpDesk: Well, I'm afraid you can't call him - he was fired along with the rest of the l@mer Winblowz support staff. The new IT director's name is "kInG-H@x0r" - but you can't speak with him right now because he's busy hacking into the Company's PBX syst
If THAT'S the future for US Business, you can say that Finnland sucessfully invaded the US with the aim of destroying it by ruining almost every American business by having their brightest mind (yes, mind) write an Operating System that Hackers would fall in love with because of the sheer geek-appeal of requiring the user to have the equivalent of a BS/BA degree in Computer Science to even make it work right - thereby destroying the IT infrastructure of most American buisnesses and bringing US productivity to a screeching halt.
KILL THE PENGUIN!!!!
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!