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U.S. Army Warns Microsoft To Back Off
declan writes "My CNET News colleague Ina Fried has written an interesting article today about how the U.S. Army has told Microsoft to stop sending free CD-ROMs of Office 2003 to government employees. In what's effectively a cease and desist order, the Army said: 'Your offer of free software places our employees and soldiers in jeopardy of unknowingly committing a violation of the ethics rules and regulations to which they have taken an oath to uphold.' Whoops! Perhaps this is Microsoft's latest way to fight free software at the Pentagon. Remember that just 8 months ago, the Army paid $471 million for Microsoft licenses."
And you know what, there's a reason for it. Others where I work got copies as well, and they are already pushing for us to get an Exchange server. There are many features in the new "Office System" that require server support. When you try to use a feature that requires support on the server, a message pops up about how you need to contact your systems administrator to find out how to enable this great new feature.
If I were to mail unchecked binary files to senior officers and ask them to run them without verifying the contents for trojans, worms or viruses the Department of Homeland Insecurity would likley have me shot in their Happy Fun Camp at Guantanamo.
And unlike a certain company *I* don't have a criminal conviction, a record of giving things that could hurt national security to the Chinese (Windows source code) or a past history of underhand payments to subvert the political process!
Where is the justice in that?
Beep beep.
My dad used to work in the contracts office in the Air Force and you couldn't accept anything that could be considered a gift. (IIRC there may have been a monetary cap on what you could accept but it was really low; even legitimate things like Christmas baskets or company tchotskes were frowned upon, which kind of weirded out suppliers the first time they dealt with the military since it could come across as rude when an Airman tells you to take your fruit basket home with you). Violation of this was taken very seriously. As big and established as MS is -- not to mention the fact they've dealt with the gov't on a contractual level for over 20 years -- this is a pretty boneheaded move. They should have known better and whoever authorized this should get shit-canned.
I am a Network Admin Here in AK and I can tell you that one of the most poisonous aspects of .Mil networking is Civillians. The other is the decisions made by Command Sections who are only interested in one thing, Budgets.
It sucks being told that your decision base on good sound Tech principles is not what they want to hear because of the cost involved.
The free software giveaway came about because a lot of paperwork is created in time with no war. Therefor people have to take their work home to get finished to make deadlines. So leadership said take a copy home install it. The Mil makes you use it. you have to get the work done so you are entitled to a free copy.
Integrity is the hardest thing to keep.
Wonder what would happen if we all sent OpenOffice.org CD-ROMS to not only the Army, but to other government agencies? Seems like a fantastic marketing idea to me, and I dont think (?) that employees would be breaking ethics rules, since it is free software.
bash: rtfm: command not found
Funny you should mention SPAWAR.... :)
I work at a SPAWAR Systems Center and it was my understanding that the Navy bought a 'Select' license from Microsoft. So we have been passing around Windows 2000/Office/Visual Studio CDs and just calling up Microsoft licensing to get keys.
So Im not sure why its a big deal if MS is sending free CDs to the army, I imagine that they have a similar licensing arrangement as we (navy) do.
As for contractors, my experience has been that they might use windows platforms, but they roll out their own proprietary solutions (like web services, etc.) to lock the navy into hiring them for maintenance contracts. Things that MS has a solution for (dot net for example) may do the job but contractors won't touch it, they offer their own homegrown solutions. Not to say that dot net is great (it isnt) but I think contractors are even worse than Microsoft.
Unfortunately their is a huge bias towards outsourcing everything to contractors and not trust government workers (I'm a civilian federal employee) to do the job. Most of the money that goes through the center just goes out to the contractors, which I think is a huge mistake. The contractors keep all the technology closed, don't tell us anything useful on how to modify their systems, and expect just fat checks.
Eh, just have them use Macs. Surely they won't have a hard time dragging files to the CD icon that automatically appears on insertion of a blank CD-R and pressing the obvious "burn" button?
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.