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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.
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.
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
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.