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Peter J. Quinn Investigated for Travel Omissions
tadelste writes to tell us O'Reilly is reporting that a recent story in the Boston News about Peter J. Quinn is nothing more than a desperate attempt to slant public opinion in the Massachusetts OpenDocument frenzy. While we have documents showing Microsoft's lobbyists paying for big trips for the former House Majority Leader and his family to go to England and Scotland, Mr. Quinn seems to be getting the spotlight for incomplete travel records. From the article in question: "On most of the trips, Quinn said, his travel and other expenses were paid for by the sponsors of the conferences. On two of the trips -- to Tucson and Washington, D.C. -- Quinn paid his own way, according to state records and an interview with Quinn."
The link is already getting slow so here's the info:
u item.2231afa58be831c14db4a11030468a0c/?pageID=itdu tilities&L=1&sid=Aitd&U=quinn_bio_publicsite
Peter Quinn has served as Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts since September of 2002 and Director of the Commonwealth's Information Technology Division (ITD). Mr. Quinn is also Founding Chair of the Government Open Code Collaborative (GOCC). As ITD Director and CIO, under the Executive Office for Administration and Finance, Mr. Quinn is responsible for setting information technology standards in the Commonwealth. Mr. Quinn came to public service following a successful career in private sector IT, most recently as the CIO for Boston Financial Data Services
http://www.mass.gov/portal/site/massgovportal/men
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Sorry, but this is the IT publshing company, not our friend Bill O'Idiot of Fox News.
http://weblogs.oreilly.com/
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Where have you been? He's the guy Microsoft hates for making the OASIS OpenDocument Format the state standard and opening the door to openoffice.org and Sun's Star Office 8. He's been instrumental in getting government to use open source software. After the ruling Microsoft went bonkers. here a quote from Bernard Golden of IDG: Microsoft has reached out to a couple of politicians in Massachusetts and gotten them to object to the process of this decision. The politicians have raised issues that mandating ODF would also mandate use of OpenOffice and that OpenOffice's open source license would mean that any commercial product that attempted to comply with the mandate would also become open source. This would certainly cause commercial vendors to avoid participating in Massachusetts IT tenders, thereby reducing choice for the state.
Peter J. Quinn is the CIO for Massachusetts. He's the guy ultimately responsible for picking ODF over Microsoft, which then resulted in MS making their XML-based document formats for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint "open".
Groklaw already has an article on it basically exonerating Mr. Quinn.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
It's MS dragging the name of a government official through the mud just because he is choosing open standards over MS.
/. is for.
It's kinda what
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
I'm huge Open Source, linux, anti-Microsoft (in the "I-wish-they-would-cut-out-the-monopolistic-abuse- crap" sense), but not at the cost of ethics.
Then I suggest you read both articles carefully, the boston globe one doesn't even list any violations that make sense in reality-land. For example:
Even though a galaxy of computer companies are listed as sponsors of many of the conferences, Quinn did not list any of them on his authorization forms or the business relationships any of them have with the Commonwealth.
If you've ever been to a tech conference you know that the list of sponsors is immense, it would not make sense to list a single company on that list because it is the conference itself (not its sponsors) who decide to pay for your visit when you're a guest. The globe article even points out earlier in the story that the guy's legal advisor didn't know exactly what he needed to do with regards to listing who paid for the trip - and later in the story it notes that when his expenses were paid by a single company he did list the name of the company.
That's unreasonable. It's not even enough money to warrant a Class C Misdemeanor. How do you know he didn't have exemptions. Most states follow the model paper work redution act. Mass is usually among the states that follow the model acts. The O'Reilly article says he that his boss was contacted and said he had permission. RTFA.
"Pamela Jones of groklaw pointed out that representatives for the disabled were demonstrating an unseemly helplessness in raising their complaint. Because several open-source tools support OpenDocument, anyone who wants accessibility added can pay someone to do the job rather than complaining about it."
So the representatives for the disabled should just "pay someone" to add the kind of accessibility features Microsoft has taken years to develop? Or the government should just "pay someone". Was the time an effort needed to "pay someone" to add accessibility added to the cost of moving to OpenDocument? Accessibility is NOT some lightweight feature you can just hack in. This is a either ridiculous strawman or the author has no idea what he's talking about.
What!? This isn't offtopic, the original poster just got the phrase wrong, he is refering to Molly Ivin's book "Who let the Dogs in: Incredible Political Animals I have Known." It's a masterpiece that discusses matters such as Bill Gates's lobbying and the effect it has had on governments around the world, among many other things.
7 90523-8815052?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400062853/103-3
Well ... sorry for replying to my own post, but I found the link.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Another Microsoft backed lobbying effort was the fake grass roots movement "Campaign for Creativity", which tried to convince the European Parliament to introduce software patents in Europe, by pretending to represent "artists, designers, writers, photographers, software developers, musicians, engineers, inventors". In reality it was just a site put up by the lobbying firm Campbell Gentry, and financed by companies like Microsoft and SAP.
This (failed) lobbying effort has how been nominated as one of the contenders for the "Worst EU Lobbying Award" 2005.
The "winner" will be selected by an open Internet poll. If you want to donate a mouse-click to the fight against software patents and the companies that try to introduce them by corrupting the political system, you can go to the site and vote online.
The award is organized by a number of watchdog groups that are working for cleaner and more transparent methods in politics, so although the award as such sounds a bit humorous, the underlying issues are quite serious.
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
It varies from community to community. In elightened places like Saugus, Massachusetts, it's very much pro open format. There are also backwaters in Massachusetts, though. I'd say the majority is for open formats... Massachusetts is a pretty tech-savvy state on the whole.
See Groklaw's comments at:
1 63314567
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051126
I'm the CTO of Altamente, mentioned in the article. We invited Peter to the conference in Puerto Rico simply because we felt that the government of Puerto Rico needed to hear what Massachusetts was doing with regard to IT. How simple is that? We don't do any business in/with Mass.
It was a great opportunity for one government to share with another some of the challanges and difficulties of budgeting information technology and one possible solution that Peter's office had proposed. Since we're an open source company, it makes perfect sense that we like what he was doing with OpenDocument.
It's just a stupid witch hunt. His trip to Brazil, Puerto Rico and most of the far flung conferences were paid by people who wanted to hear what he had to say, what he was doing, and how they could do the same. As many people wanted to listen to Dr. Edgar David Villanueva from Peru, lots of people want to hear what Peter Quinn has to say as well. Same deal.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
A little clarification would be a good idea though --
#1 It IS a mandate. Page 18 of v3.5 of the ETRM states that documents shall be saved in the ODF format. Not a mandate for OO.o, but a mandate for ODF; the ETRM spells out what programs are currently supported. It's an odd mandate because page 21 that says "oh yeah, you can use pdf as well".
The fact that they list off supported programs gets a little fuzzy. Government documents often 'require' things by listing off acceptable purchases. Even odder is the fact that at the time the ETRM was released, NONE of the listed programs supported the OASIS standard ODF format in a non-beta version. So the fact that they listed programs that were expected to support definitely suggests a pseudo-mandate. If they had left the named programs off, I think it would have been far cleaner and less suspect.
Here's the relevant lines from ETRM v3.5:
Guidelines - The OpenDocument format must be used for office documents such as text documents (.odt), spreadsheets (.ods), and presentations (.odp). The OpenDocument format is currently supported by a variety of office applications including OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, KOffice, and IBM Workplace.
Any acquisition of new office applications must support the OpenDocument standard.
#2 is obviously totally wrong. ODF doesn't make anything automatically OSS.
I think what they were complaining about was Eric Kriss' line that "Sovereignty trumps IP 100% of the time", but who knows.
My biggest beef with the whole thing is how everyone pretends that this is something other than a corporate battle between Sun, IBM and Microsoft. With Google just hanging out on the sidelines, waiting to crush all.
An IBM owned company produced the study that led to this decision, Sun and IBM dominate the board of OASIS, and Microsoft is likley to control the board of ECMA for their new OpenXML standard.
This isn't good versus evil, it's big publicly held companies using the standards process to do battle. It ain't nothing new, just look at the standards wars in the wireless phone space!
A sig?!? I don't think so.....
The issue here is not one of Mr. Quinn being on the take. I can assure you he is not. In fact, Mr. Quinn believes very seriously in the effort that he has undertaken, and will fight it to the end.
The real issue here is the antiquated regulations regarding travel in the Commonwealth. I know, because I worked there 20 years ago, and the regulations were antiquated then, and have never been amended to take into account today's business environment.
Basically, the regs state that all employees that travel out of state have to have the permission of their supervisor, and once they have that, they have to pay for the travel themselves, unless they are on a speaking engagement. Even then, they cannot accept payment for the travel if there is a potential that the sponsor would be doing business with the state. These rules were primarily created to make it difficult to ask for approval. And if you did pay for the travel yourself, you were sure to be notified by the Legislature the next year that this obviously discretionary spending would be removed from your budget -- good luck ever getting the State to pay for any travel.
Mr. Quinn had signed approval of at least 5 trips. The signoff was from the former Secretary of Administration and Finance, who recently left government. It was this Secretary that was leading the fight against Microsoft, and Mr. Quinn was fulfilling this Secretary's wishes. Why he didn't get approval for all 12 trips -- who knows? But what does it really matter? All of the trips were for speaking engagements at conferences where there was no clear single sponsor. That being the case, why shouldn't Mr. Quinn allow the sponsor to pay for the travel? It saves money for the taxpayers, and provides exposure to what other entities are doing to implement Open Source.
It's obvious to me that this was a hack job by lobbyists -- something that Microsoft made clear during an open hearing with Mr. Quinn regarding the State's open source philosophy that they were very willing to undertake.