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Microsoft Sinks Teeth Into New Orleans
An anonymous reader writes: "The New Orleans Times-Picayune is reporting that Mayor Nagin is considering letting Microsoft upgrade the city's computers free of charge. The catch? New Orleans eventually has to buy the software and Microsoft gets to use the city as a marketing model to push this on the rest of the country." According to the article, a similar system Microsoft developed for Oklahoma "is expected to expand into accident reporting, video arraignment and automated pawn-shop-ticket tracking." So don't worry about privacy -- it's all taken care of. Open bidding's taken care of too: "Because these services are considered a gift, the city won't have to publicly bid the project." Sounds like dirty pool to me.
The article says they eventually have to buy software, as in down the road they'll pay for software but not the stuff that is being given to them. I'm from New Orleans, and frankly unless something like this happened, there is no way our city's information infrastructure was going to be overhauled. In the article, it said it was saving us $100 million. Except that New Orleans doesn't have $100 million to spend.
They're not just talking about giving away unlimited copies of Windows XP, they're talking about modernizing and developing systems that antiquated or non-existant. City gov't could go download all the copies of Linux they like, but they still would have to pay people to build the databases and various systems our city lacks. I recently got a traffic ticket down here. On the ticket it tells you can pay on the web or by phone. Guess what? Those systems simply don't exist! Our city's IT capabilities are in shambles.
Sorry fellas, but this is GOOD thing for the city of New Orleans.
MikeAtIF*ckStuffedAnimalsDotCom
The problem with what MS is doing is that they are managing to avoid the procurement process that most government agencies are subject to. Remember the outcry in California when the state sole-sourced a Master License Agreement with Oracle? And then, after a few months of people saying that the state shouldn't have done that, it turned out that there were some shady political contributions from Oracle to the Governor's office.
If you look at the history of government procurement, racketereering and corrruption laws you will see that they were almost all passed to prevent sole-source government procurement because it's bad for the citizens. This is pretty tricky on Microsoft's part. It certainly violates the spirit of the law, if not the actual letter.
In my universe I'm perfectly normal, it's not my fault you don't live in my universe.
If this was Redhat doing this it would be praised.