Microsoft's Big Stick in Peru

An anonymous reader points out a Wired story on the continuing Peru saga. In this latest episode, Wired notes that the U.S. Ambassador to Peru has chimed in in support of Microsoft and in opposition to Dr. Villanueva's bill which would have mandated open source software be used by the Peruvian government. On the one hand, sure, our diplomats have a national goal of promoting U.S. enterprise, but do we have to promote companies which we are simultaneously pursuing in court for numerous violations of our laws? Isn't that a bit counter-productive?

Comments

Re:Politics in America today

[greenguy]

That's why there's a Green Party. We accept no corporate money. That keeps us focused on the things the US really needs: renewable energy, taxes on "bads," not goods, an end to overseas military bases, a government that sees people as citizens, not consumers (and increasingly, prisoners), and so on. For more info, see http://www.greenpartyus.org, or for the Platform, http://www.gp.org.

To veer this back on-topic, I should mention that there is a movement within the Greens to include a detailed plank on software rights and DRM in the next major release of our platform.

Re:Stock market

[HydroCarbon10]

Really? Could you please explain to those of us who are quite obviously in the dark how not having red hot competition in the OS and office suite market is helping the US economy? There could be many more jobs out there for programmers right now if there were, for example, 4 worthy competitors to NT in widespread use. This recession started as a slump in business spending, a slump that would have definately been less pronounced had there been four competing companies fighting tooth and nail to stay alive in a ruthless market for operating system software. Want an example: see ATI vs. nVidia, neither can afford to lose and neither will ever win (hopefully).

We shouldn't resign ourself to the current status quo when things can be changed for the better right now.