Following Bill Gates' Linux Attack Money

UnderScan writes "After researching this material for about three years, Tom Adelstein tracks Microsoft's anti-Linux lobbying money: "Microsoft has unparalleled influence throughout the Federal government. On the cover of a recent edition of VarBusiness Magazine dated June 26, 2005 the editors presented a large headline which read: 'It's A Microsoft World. Five years after running afoul of the Feds, Microsoft is as powerful as ever. Pushing a platform instead of products could make it stronger still. Why nothing seems to stop it.'""

Comments

Re:Microsoft

[nanop]

Other's already have.
See Jeffrey Vernon Merkey's court complaint against, well... everyone.
An excerpt from the "FACTS COMMON TO ALL CAUSES OF ACTION" section:

42. Much of the activities of Linux and OSS have served to create a funneling system allowing sensitive and advanced technology created by computer technology companies in the United States to be illegally exported out of the United States and into the hands of the citizens of other countries.
43. As a result of these activities, a large portion of US technology has been unwittingly placed into the hands of various groups around the world, including Al-Queda, and other groups who sponsor international terrorism.
44. As a result of these activities, a large portion of US technology has been unwittingly placed into the hands of various groups around the world, including radical governments and groups who sponsor and have used the technology in support of the creation of weapons of mass murder and mass destruction designed to murder American Citizens and their families.

Preston Gates Scandal Info ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Information on Preston Gates scancal

Re:I don't get it

[Fiver-]

The GP is a Usenet post from 2003.

Burn.

Re:sure

[JerkyBoy]

Amateur hour or not, the following should pique your interest:

In Figure 5, one can see that the Chairman of the Senator Judiciary Committee received funds for re-election from Microsoft. This is the same Microsoft that the same the committee questioned with regard to the last Federal anti-trust settlement.

And with regards to the paper, rather than digital, trail of campaign contributions:

One might consider this an ideal scenario for a monopolist whose compliance audits related to its settlement with the Department of Justice exist in secrecy.

With regards to the settlement, Ralph Nader had this to say:

It is astonishing that the agreement fails to provide any penalty for Microsoft's past misdeeds, creating both the sense that Microsoft is escaping punishment because of its extraordinary political and economic power, and undermining the value of antitrust penalties as a deterrent. Second, the agreement does not adequately address the concerns about Microsoft's failure to abide by the spirit or the letter of previous agreements, offering a weak oversight regime that suffers in several specific areas. Indeed, the proposed alternative dispute resolution for compliance with the agreement embraces many of the worst features of such systems, operating in secrecy, lacking independence, and open to undue influence from Microsoft.

Have a look at the people involved in the antitrust case against MS:

Phil Bond: Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology. Bond is the highest-ranking appointed official who deals with technology. He is the former top aide to U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.), whose district includes Microsoft's hometown of Redmond. Bond's top policy aide at Commerce was Connie Correll Partoyan, the former executive vice president of TechNet (a Microsoft-funded trade association), who recently took a lobbying job for the law firm Preston, Gates, Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds.

William Kolasky: Appointed deputy assistant attorney general for international enforcement for the Justice Department's antitrust division in October 2001. Kolasky was a lawyer for the Association for Competitive Technology, a group whose largest contributor is Microsoft, and wrote a friend of the court brief supporting Microsoft in its antitrust lawsuit.

Ed Gillespie: Until recently, he headed the Republican National Committee. Gillespie helped build the Republican party and identified candidates for state and federal elections. He has returned to Quinn Gillespie & Associates. Prior to becoming the head of the RNC he was a Microsoft lobbyist. Microsoft paid his lobbying firm, Quinn Gillespie & Associates, $1.2 million between 2001 and 2003, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

Richard Wallis: Microsoft's associate general counsel chairs the American Bar Association's antitrust section. This group influences how much oversight federal judges have over antitrust settlements. In late June, a U.S. appeals court rejected claims that Microsoft's 2001 deal with the government was too lenient.

Already done.

[Anonymous Coward]

A few times in fact. And each and every accuser has had one thing in common: some connection to Microsoft. First it was by noted Microsoft evangelist Rob Erndale that Linux users were potential terrorists. Another one is the Micorosft sponsored group ADTI who have been publishing articles detailing how terrorists could use Linux to attack the USA and so it should be outlawed.

Re:sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is strictly amateur hour.

This is hardly true. Even years ago, a CCIA report (submitted to the court during the MS antitrust case -- admittedly CCIA is/was a critic of MS) called Microsoft's political influence "in many ways unprecedented in modern political history." One Seattle based study/article placed Microsoft as the number three corporate political donor. Nor can one discount the effect of policy groups, think tanks, and industry groups financed by the corporation but not accounted for in lobbying and political contributions.

There have been a number of shareholder efforts attempting to get MS to either prohibit unregulated soft money contributions or publish policies for such spending. Here for example.

Anyway, this is a tiny bit of the info that's out there. Just possibly, Microsoft is more than an amateur in political influence.

Re:Microsoft

[bnenning]

Holy crap. You stopped before it got really good:

46. The beheading and murder of United States Citizens in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other countries have been videotaped, converted to MPEG and other images for viewing on the public Internet through the use of OSS and Linux software and computer technology developed and purloined by Linux and OSS members and illegally exported from the United States.

This guy makes Darl look like the poster child for mental health.

Re:I don't get it

[Bent Mind]

I don't have any experience with Ubuntu. However, I have years of experience with SuSE and switched to Gentoo a couple of years back.

RPM hell: RPM (generally) only has problems if you try to install an RPM compiled by someone other than your distro. maintainer. This happens for various reasons. However, with SuSE, it was mainly because the package name includes the version number (rather then using RPM's built-in version handling) and most of the libraries are heavily patched. I switched to Gentoo because I kept finding myself compiling from source to get things working. I figured if I'm compiling from source anyway...

Video card resolution: I've never had a problem getting maximum resolution from a video card. I have one ATI system, the rest are nVidia. I do have problems with color depth though. I can't get 32-bit color to work. 24-bit works fine.

Capture programs: I believe he's talking about Video Capture, not image capture. I don't have any experience with the All-in-Wonder. However, I do have an nVidia GeForce 2 with built-in tuner (can't remember the name of it). I can get it to work with Linux. However, the quality is very poor. I bought a pchdtv card that works like a charm. As a side note, having your tv tuner on your graphics card sucks when you want to play the latest game and it requires an upgrade.

Music/Video skipping: Hmm, check your DMA settings. Maybe your not using your drives at full speed?

My printer (Brother all in one fax/copier/printer) did not work: I also have a Brother all in one. It doesn't work with Linux, even with Cups. I dumped the piece of garbage for an Epson R300. Works like a charm. I'd also recommend HP. The PSC 2400 makes a nice replacement for your Brother.

Couldn't log into my router: Many cheap routers have buggy web interfaces. Does your router support telnet, or better yet ssh?

Linux has it's problems, but then, so does Windows. I have a few webcams that work great under Linux, but don't under XP. The pchdtv also doesn't work under Windows. That said, use what works for you.

yes it is a troll. google the text

[dingfelder]

yes it is a troll. google the text

it was pasted from a post in google groups

Re:Federal access

[jc42]

Why just pin it on Dubya? Did you think it didn't go on before and won't go on afterwords?

Actually, there's a lot of data about this available online. One of the big changes at Microsoft in 2004 was a huge increase in campaign contributions. They went from being an insignificant source of campaign funds to one of the largest contributors.

While they contributed to a lot of campaigns, most of their contributions are fairly well documented as having gone to the Bush/Cheney campaign funds, either directly or indirectly via such routes as PACs. They were one of Bush's largest contributors.

It wasn't long after the election, of course, before the Justice Department caved and essentially gave Microsoft a free pass for their past and future transgressions. This has been widely understood as payoff, of course.

But all it really means is that Microsoft has faced up to the way that large organizations like governments (and many megacorporations) work. They have moved to a "marketing" approach that's better for this market than what has worked so well with the non-technical public. A true cynic would call this a rational marketing decision.