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Microsoft's 'Men in Black' Kill Florida Open Standards Legislation
A NewsForge article was handed to us talking about pressure Microsoft recently brought to bear on a piece of Florida legislation. A few short paragraphs in Senate bill 1974 added by Rep. Ed Homan discussed the need for open data formats, but Microsoft's men in black responded by pressuring legislators and staff employees about the bill's language. "A legislative staff employee who would lose his job if he were quoted here by name said, 'By the time those lobbyists were done talking, it sounded like ODF (Open Document Format, the free and open format used by OpenOffice.org and other free software) was proprietary and the Microsoft format was the open and free one.' Two other legislative employees (who must also remain anonymous) told Linux.com that the Microsoft lobbyists implied that elected representatives who voted against Microsoft's interests might have a little more trouble raising campaign funds than they would if they helped the IT giant achieve its Florida goals. Note that lobbyists for IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Novell -- the only three companies with a major interest in open source who have registered lobbyists in Florida -- did not weigh in on this matter." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
Make a conscious decision to move away from Microsoft technologies, at whatever levels of personal cost you can accept.
Buy Linux. Buy a Mac.
Getting on Slashdot and whining about this crap is goofy if you're posting from IE, running XP or Vista, running MS Office; and especially stupid if your a corporate decision maker that hasn't at least spend a good amount of time figuring out if you can migrate from MS.
MS's business practices are bad. They're rotten to the core, and that's been proven over and over again. Don't do business with them; take it elsewhere.
It's really not impossible; major corporations have made the jump before, and we're building a first class IT infrastructure that will be MS-free end-to-end.
Stop whinning. Make a decision. Vote with your $$$, and whenever you have a choice don't buy MS.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I like the nice, thinly veiled reference to campaign fundraising that was made.
So what's taking so long with election reform again?
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
The last comment about companies which have a vested interest (and let me add Google) in people adopting an open standard is very pertinent.
What do we expect Microsoft to do? Document standards, in my opinion, are the lynch pin of their entire dominance. Move to open file standards and they are in deep trouble.
Those companies who want to end that dominance need to step up to the plate. Microsoft has a right to withhold campaign funding. They have a right to lobby. But so do their opponents.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
It doesn't matter what the rules are, or how many foolish insinuations you can make about your enemies' dress codes, if your legislative process lets you put stuff in without anybody knowing about it.
"Two other legislative employees (who must also remain anonymous) told Linux.com that the Microsoft lobbyists implied that elected representatives who voted against Microsoft's interests might have a little more trouble raising campaign funds than they would if they helped the IT giant achieve its Florida goals."
When you're done hooking up your home computers with free software, make sure you notify your elected representatives that you know what bribes look like
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
That is all that matters. Corporations shouldn't have rights, so I don't give a shit about what Microsoft's 'rights' are. Corporations have their special privledges because these privledges are supposed to impart more value to the citizens of this nation. When a corporation uses its privledges to profit at the expense of the people, they should be punished.
Of course, Microsoft is one of the few American companies that still produces things for export...the government is always going to give them special treatment.
Blar.
According to the article...
"Rep. Homan and his son Doug tried to add their little open standards boost to SB 1974 as quietly as possible. They wanted the modified bill to at least get through its first committee approval before anyone spotted what they had done."
Doesn't exactly strike me as an open or up front method of passing legislation.
Oh come on. Lobbying in and of itself is simply bringing concerns to government, something that is enshrined in the US Constitution. That's not to say that lobbyists and politicians won't misbehave, and will bring the whole system down. The problem with most Western political systems is that lobbying has become a profession in and of itself. It isn't about citizens looking for redress from their representatives, it's about a relatively small number of very large interests poisoning the well. Lobbyists have become so powerful that in some cases it appears that they have even written legislation.
The problem I have with this particular case is that we have a convicted monopolist threatening politicians to further their monopoly. The politicians should, by right, be showing any Microsoft representative the door and telling them to get stuffed. Unfortunately, in the real world, politicians spend more time worrying about how to win the next election than about doing their jobs. Thus they became little more than whores, jumping into bed with anyone they think can give them a few extra bucks towards their next election.
About the best you can do is write your legislators, explain to them that they could be doing a great deal to help commerce in the United States by adopting an open standard rather than permitting a convicted monopolist to maintain a stranglehold on a major computing standard. It's likely that your average legislator probably won't understand a bloody word you said, but that's where it sits.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So you see the absurd effort M$ must make to continue it's format monopoly. You can imagine they monitor all state legislators and are ready to send in people like this every time. Because there is such a huge performance and cost difference between M$ and their competitor's products, the "men in black" are going to be very busy.
The only person who has to be more vigilant than a free man is a slave owner.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The organizations with the money want the political influence.
The people with the political influence want the money.
Neither of those groups include the average person.
Lobbying is a legal occupation that pays somewhere in the high-6-figure to low-7-figure range. Bribery and extortion are crimes that often result in prison time and heavy fines. Other than that, there's not much difference.
My blog
While I don't disagree with you in any way, I just think there's too much anonymity and unsubstantiated content in there to really put any weight behind this specific article. Sure it happens, but the whole "who woudl lose his job if he were named" thing makes it a little bit suspect.
Sure, MS uses all kinds of ethically suspect business practices. But if we were all to buy a mac today and continue to use proprietary formats for our data we'd have accomplished absolutely nothing.
I don't think which OS you use is nearly as important as what formats you use. If we could convince our friends and colleagues that closed formats were unacceptable, and collectively send that message to MS (and Apple, and ...), then things would change. I don't care what OS you use, but it is incredibly aggravating that for no better reason than social inertia I almost have to use .doc formats for my own ideas, at least if I want to share them with my supervisor, journal editors, etc. But once we reject undocumented, closed formats, I don't care what OS and applications you use. If you choose to edit your XML based document in MSWord, that's fine, so long as I can choose to edit that same document in OOo, Abiword, Emacs, ed, awk or whatever else.
'course, if we agreed to use only open formats, then MS would have to start competing on new features rather than the inconvenience of switching to other systems. But you never know, they might be capable of a few good ideas if we force the issue. That's the real point - not to eliminate MS, but to make them serve the needs of their customers, rather than imposing their will on their customers, and everyone their customers interact with.
yp.
This just proves how much of a threat MS perceives OO.o and other open source projects.
It also shows the costs of maintaining the monopoly we are all paying. The slave holder gets all tools and income from slaves.
It's a death spiral for M$. The harder they try, the more expensive the monopoly becomes the more people will want to escape. News of this "success" will quickly turn into dozens of challenges. Real successes, where states and businesses actually save time money and trouble by bucking M$, will be promote even more challenges.
It's funny that consideration of any alternative should be considered a "challenge" but that's they way M$ sees it and acts. Kudoos to you, Peter Quinn! The M$ monopoly is on the way out.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I wish the public media would pick up on some of this stuff. It would be great to see John Stossel do a "Give me a break!" on his 20/20 thing about Micrsosoft. Its not that bad information doesn't get out about Microsoft, its that the majority of the population is uninformed about about alternatives, and the bad company ethics of Microsoft.
Support the source, Open Source! An entire site developed with OSS
This is Slashdot, so Microsoft will get crucified here for sure, but they are a BUSINESS, and they are working to protect their business. Every shareholder of every company wants management of that company to protect their business. It is their duty to the shareholders.
The people who should be receiving scorn are the CAREER POLITICIANS who write legislation in exchange for corporate dollars. Substitute any big corporate interest for Microsoft (Tobacco, Oil, Autos....etc) and you will see that Microsoft is not the only company that engages in these shenanigans.
Sure bitch and whine about Microsoft and how evil they are....you don't have to buy their products.
I would much rather bitch and whine about elected officials that are not doing the jobs they were elected to do.
If they take corporate money - vote the fuckers out.
-ted
No:
Lobbying is a legal occupation that pays somewhere in the high-6-figure to low-7-figure range. Bribery and extortion are crimes that often result in prison time and heavy fines and occur when the lobbyist attempts to lobby with insufficient funding. Other than that, there's not much difference.
Microsoft has a right to withhold campaign funding. They have a right to lobby.
Rights? What are you talking about? No one has the right to threaten legislators. Offering them money in exchange for votes is also a criminal violation. Even the usual "rights" you might ascribe to a public company have no force when you are talking about a convicted monopolist like M$. Microsoft's reported behavior is unethical at best, criminal at worst.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is rather like the difference between the numbers games run by the mob, and a state lottery.
The mob corrupts the public by offering games of chance. The state lottery corrupts and fleeces the public by offering games of chance with much worse odds than your neighborhood numbers runner. Of course the states have to make running numbers illegal -- it undercuts their product.
Lobbying is theoretically not like bribery at all. You aren't supposed to give quid pro quos. You just give public servants the benefits of your opinion. You can, in a completely "unrelated" way give modest donations to the candidates who listen to you.
Which is where campaign finance reform comes in.
To understand this connection, you have to separate the role of money in campaigns from the influence of money. Candidates use money to get their message out. Money in politics is a good thing. The problem is the influence of money. Some pigs are not supposed to be more equal than others. Just because I donated $1000, I shouldn't be more worth listening to than some other citizen. So while money in politics is a good thing, the influence of money in politics is a bad thing.
The problem is you cannot get rid of the influence of money by choking off the money supply. In fact you end up throwing out the baby and keeping the bath water. What happens is by the process of elementary economics is that the marginal value of the next dollar becomes much greater. It ensures that obtaining more money is the highest priority of any candidate.
That's pernicious effect #1. Pernicious effect #2 is that while the price political influence is now at all time low in real dollars, campaign finance reform makes the process of moving dollars to where they are needed awkward. Far from favoring the average citizen, it means that highly professional organizations which do influence peddling on an industrial scale are favored.
And, like the state lottery, their competition is illegal. You as a citizen can't walk up to your elected representative and pay him an honest buck to do you a favor. You have to use lobbyists, who don't exactly pay him a buck so much as get rid of a buck's worth of headache for him.
Now, if you want to get rid of the influence of money, there's really only one way to do it. Matching funds. This is not just public funding -- which does not work. In public funding, Candidate A agrees to take public funds and in return limits his spending. This means Candidate B has an incentive to opt out, then raise and spend an unconscionable amount of money. This gives him a clear advantage over A that A cannot match. We can see the uselessness of public funding, which also turns out to increase the marginal value of the next donation dollar. You want your sucker opponents to starve to death on public funding while you feast on special interest donations.
Matching funds works like this. Candidate A raises $500 million dollars to run for president. The United States Treasury cuts a check to the campaign funds of Candidate's B and C, in the amount of $500 million. Except that it will never happen. Nobody will bother taking the time to raise $500 million when their competitors can spend their time on more worthwhile things, and collect their check at the end of the day.
But of course, that would be like the states closing down their lotteries and letting their citizens run a legal numbers game.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Look, when you have a major corporation using money to get rid of legislation that is harmful to its monopoly (as determined by the courts), you have a problem. I have no idea what the solution is. I don't think any amount of reform will get rid of the effect.
I don't recall the EFF ever having the bags of money that Microsoft has. Lobbying, like so many things, is an economy of scales. The best the EFF can do is try to convince legislators to do what is right by the only people that should even count; the public. Microsoft can do a helluva lot more, mainly by buying friendly legislators and threatening to reduce or eliminate campaign donations for those that don't do what's right. Perhaps what should be considered is that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and perhaps convicted monopolists' ability to talk to politicians should be strictly limited.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Those companies who want to end that dominance need to step up to the plate.
They have, of course. Netscape, IBM, Sun, Google, Caldera, Red Hat, Novel, and many others have and are doing everything any company should be expected to do. They are producing superior alternatives and offering them at a fair price. It is only because of M$'s abusive anti-trust activities that their sub standard software "dominates" government and business data transactions. In response to M$'s many abusive practices, many of these companies have gone further than they naturally should. Sun has fostered and supports an entire alternative Office Suite, which is M$'s big money earner, as free software and spends real money reverse engineering M$'s dirty tricks. The result is competitive on both features and cost. When M$ blocks this natural competition by legislative tampering, we all lose the benefits of a free market.
The size of those losses is the size of Bill Gates' fortune and the pile of money his company sits on. The cost of all the dirty tricks is rolled up in the billion dollars a month they spend on "marketing." Every dollar they spend comes out of your hide. It's part of the cost of everything you buy.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Microsoft is not just any old self serving company. There is a full spectrum of bad corporate behavior and
Microsoft is way over toward the end where market control by indirect means (political and otherwise)
dominates over competitive service and products. Additionally the service that they are controlling is vital
to national security and indirectly to an increasing number of quality-of-life services.
Unfortunately many would argue that their products and services are superior. As Microsoft reaches deeper
and deeper into our pockets and lives many more will be inclined to argue on Microsoft's behalf rather than admit what
they have allowed Microsoft to do to them.
The ultimate solution is as you indicate: If at all possible don't buy their products. It seems to be the
only remaining type of voting that almost matters. Unfortunately, at this point in time,
the file formats for Microsoft products are not sufficiently readable by any other product to make
them a reliable substitute in today's business environment. Open Office is a great product but
the file format issue will eventually kill it unless these battles can be won.
"A legislative staff employee who would lose his job if he were quoted here by name said, 'By the time those lobbyists were done talking, it sounded like ODF (Open Document Format, the free and open format used by OpenOffice.org and other free software) was proprietary and the Microsoft format was the open and free one.'
OK. But when looking at the disputed text of this legislation as shown on the linked article, it would seem that anyone believing this ODF=proprietary MS=open hullubaloo, would also believe that this MS=open should be compatible with that same text, and not see a reason to change it.
One would hope that politicians being told that MS's format is the most open one, and also being told that MS wants this "open format" legislation text removed, would notice some degree of conflict between the two things. If you want me to believe you're the open guy, then why do you also want the open text removed from the legislation? Hmmm...
This is another Microsoft (help I'm bleeding money) tactic. Recently Microsoft proclaimed it will end support for XP on January 31st 2008; this, a quick decisive 'squeeze as much blood out of the turnip before the turnip dries up' tactic which will keep money streaming in for Microsoft a little while longer: people will run out and buy whatever they need to keep on Microsoft-ing away.
Taken into consideration with this article on Florida bureaucracy out-bureaucracy-afied by Microsoft henchman.
And what of the empires (that'd be Microsoft) attempts in California? What about Texas and Minnesota-- Microsoft is there too?
Are our public (synonymous with open standard) bureaucrats bureaucratic enough to represent us and what is good for America?
Politicians/Bureaucrats are blind to the monopolistic efforts carried out by Microsoft -- maybe its time we elected some 'Slash dot-ers.'
Seriously, though, you are correct that the legislature is culpable for being influenced in this way. No individual nor any corporation has any business running the Government, which is what this kind of stick/carrot lobbying amounts to, and no government employee (including public officials) has any business deferring matters of state to those individuals or corporations.
Microsoft does indeed have its own interests at heart, though one might quibble over whether protecting file standards is helpful or harmful to them. In the long run, lockins poison the vendors as much they do the consumer. It is also debatable as to what they may lawfully lobby for, given they are a convicted monopolist. (They don't have to agree with the decision, but they still have an obligation to abide by it. It is not for Microsoft to determine the law.)
However, ultimately nobody made the officials take what amount to bribes. Nobody held a gun to their head, although politicians probably have a hard time distinguishing immediate physical danger from a loss of election funds. I truly hope that there is a thorough investigation as to what was said and what was done by whom, and that those public officials found guilty of violating the ethical standards required of them are removed from office. In the end, as much as I dislike Microsoft's role in all this, and as much as I like to diss Microsoft for their conduct at times, this is ultimately not a tale of Microsoft's operations but a tale of corruption and manoevering in assorted halls of power. There are millions of companies no better than Microsoft and many are probably worse. The only common denominator, the only place you can throttle back on will-legislate-for-cash mindsets, is within the political system itself. You still need to fix the flaws in corporate politics, but one major scandal at a time, please.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
why does being a business mean you can be unethical? That single notion which is apparently accepted by many people is the source of a tremendous amount of harm in the world.
David Welch was fired in 2002. Twice the legal system ruled that he was protected by whistleblower protection provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley laws, and should be given his job back. He was still unemployed in October 2006, I'm betting he still hasn't got his job back. Only a fucking idiot trusts in the legal system to protect his free speech rights in a timely fashion.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
So.....like a political party?
This is not about helping OOo. There is no reason for MS to do anything to help OOo. But if we let the argument get reframed into a MSword vs OOwriter debate we miss the larger picture.
The big picture issue here is maintaining access to our own data. My thesis, in .tex format, could be read by any editor from the past three decades. .doc didn't exist 30 years ago, and even over the timespan when it did there's not guarantee that documents are forward and backward compatible. There's every reason to expect that a .doc file written today will be totally unreadable by any editor available in 30 years time. My .tex file will read just fine.
The point is it's in our best interest to use open formats. MS gets the job done *today*, but at the cost of placing our trust in a notably untrustworthy company. If they change the format they force us all to upgrade to maintain the ability to freely access and exchange our data with each other. MS can choose to change the rules at any time. Or they could just get out of the wordprocessing business altogether, leaving us high and dry.
The fact that 90% of the world currently uses .doc format for exchanging formatted text doesn't preclude improving on that model. I'm not demanding that we all switch to .tex format now, although that would be most convenient for me. I am demanding that we put all public data into a publicly available format. It is a very bad idea to let ourselves stockpile large volumes of information in formats that we don't control. Granted, there is no compelling moral reason to impose this on private individuals, although it would be in their best interest as well in the long run.
Your car analogy is flawed, as they usually are. Proprietary document formats are like books that can only be read when sitting in an approved chair, or under a special light. That may be marginally acceptable when the chair or light is ubiquitous, but it is ultimately an unnecessary restriction. There are better alternatives, so why should we accept such arbitrary limits?
The .doc format isn't really the issue here, it just becomes a target because it is the main obstacle in returning to a situation where we control our own data.
yp.
If you write to Rep. Homan, it should be to thank him for supporting open standards. He's the good guy here.
:)
And rather than sending negative letters to other state legislators, how about teaching them what open standards are and about the positive attributes of open source?
The biggest problem with the legislators on this issue isn't corruption, but ignorance. Most of them have never really heard of a "Linux." They get their information about IT from the same media sources as their constituents.
Education is the key here. I will start *educating* my legislators about open standards and open source once the current legislative session is over.
I'll also be talking about how directly talking to the IT people in state government may be more effective than talking to legislators, but that'll be a separate article about lobbying for open source based on suggestions and input from one of the lobbyists I quoted anonymously in this article.
- Robin
Your argument falls apart the minute you say that you don't have to buy their product.
.doc files, they do not always translate and read 100% perfectly on microsoft software, and so you usually have to use MS Office to check it before sending it in to make sure it shows right, or risk fines or other government penalties.
Because you do.
You work for the government? You get stuck on microsoft office. You want to turn in a document to the government? Most require that it be in a word format.
While open office can do
As long as microsoft strongarms business and the government, you don't have a choice. And that is why this is such a big deal.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
Most Western political systems? Almost only in the US of A. Take for example the MAFIAA, organisations like them exist in many countries but in most cases their opinion equals dipshit. Even if they have the same huge companies behind them.
(Go ahead and mod me troll, butat least think about it. Don't neglect things like these with "most Western countries" when it's not true)
Corporations should be able to have influence as long it is in the direct interests of the constituents of the politician they are lobbying.
Corporations should never have influence or the ability to lobby politically!!! Only citizens, including stockholders, should have the ability to do these.
FalconShould there be a Law?