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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.
This just proves how much of a threat MS perceives OO.o and other open source projects.
I've read the wikipedia article and such, but I still don't see how lobbying is any different than bribery and extortion.
Is lobbying just a superset of both those things?
Read my Very Short "Stories"
It used to be that Unix was for serious work and Windows was for light duty stuff. I'm starting to see people run Linux/Mac for light duty (email, office) and run use Windows for the odd critical application (EDA, CAD). Strange how things flipped.
This is exactly the reason that lobbyists should not be allowed any direct contact with politicians or their staff. Imagine if they had to submit peer reviewed research/arguments for every proposal.
Of course the MPAA/RIAA would prove that it would promote piracy, Microsoft would prove that it would encourage the use of closed standards and piracy, and the FBI would say that it would make fighting terrorism and child pornography more difficult.
"make sure you notify your elected representatives that you know what bribes look like"
Bribes or Blackmail?
Microsoft must win every one of these battles. Let any reasonably sized enterprise outside of Sun/IBM, or governmental entity show that they can use OOS successfully and they'll become an example showing Microsoft's lies. It's a Whack-a-Mole game for MS, and sooner or later they'll miss one.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Watch out, Texas is next -- I hope one of the news agencies pick this up, somebody call 60 Minutes (a CBS TV show). http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/BillLookup/History. aspx?LegSess=80R&Bill=SB446
Here in Colorado, we passed an amendment 41 recently. Roughly, it prevents money from changing hands between lobbyists and (state congress|state employees). What I find interesting is how many congressmen are fighting this. In particular, it is the dems that are most upset. I think that an updated version of 41 is needed for ALL states and then finally at a federal level. But this does not go far enough.
Joel Hefley was a Colorado congressman who was on the house ethics committee. He was responsible for pushing the ethics committee to go after Delay for his numerous abuses. In turn the republicans booted him out. After having spent many years on the group, he came back that the only way to stop all of this is to move to public Financing of campaigns. Then ALL money would be prevented from moving from ANYBODY to a congressman. Many will fight this, and will claim that it violates their first amendment rights. But every time we have put limits on money flow to congressman, it has been approved by SCOTUS. IOW, it would probably pass muster. This would have a nice benefit in that we would get to see how politicians run a campaign on a limited amount of resources. If they fail at it, then we do not want them. They will prove that they are incapable of running a state|country. This would also stop these kind of wil situations where a companies needs are put above the states or even the countries. This is the cheapest way to get back our gov.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Free market indeed -- as in "not even close". In a free market (under limited government), there wouldn't be much reason to bribe government, would there? You can't get yourself a piece of the pie if the pie doesn't exist in the first place!
(Just so we're clear, what we have today in the US is not even close to a free market. Indeed, government and its special "right" to employ coercion is more heavily entangled in business than ever before.)
Unfortunately, I have to deal with journal editors who require 'word processing' documents, preferably .doc format. I'm not sure why exactly, as they must convert it to something more robust before it gets sent for printing, but at the submission stage it has to be .doc. And my supervisor and several other professional contacts use the 'track changes' option in Word for their comments, which doesn't seem to work with OOo. Thankfully my thesis can be submitted as pdf, so my supervisor is going to have to deal with pdf|rtf|tex for final revisions. She actually prefers to read left-justified double-spaced word documents over tex-formatted pdf output. I think it's a form of 'Stockholm Syndrome'.
As soon as I graduate, and move a step up from the bottom of the academic ladder, it will be time for some aggressive advocacy in favour of at least .odf, if not .tex, for document exchange. Sadly, as a grad student if you don't follow the rules you don't graduate...
yp.
The parent wasn't talking about saving money, he was talking about voting with dollars. Well, if don't buy Linux or a Mac, you're not voting with your dollars.
You have to either buy Linux (over-the-counter box) or a Mac in order to not only lower the revenues of Microsoft, but also increase the cash-counted installed userbase, which seems to be the only things "serious/public" statistics check for. Browsers stats means absolutely nothing (so many variables that it's not even valid as a statistic).
Any job ad I post includes the phrase "Word documents will be discarded unread".
What a confused and insulting post. It does not take long for the Microsoft Defenders to act, does it?
s/b: The harder they try, the more extensive the monopoly becomes the more people will be unable to escape.
You can't expand a monopoly, you can only lose it.
It doesn't show any costs to me. What it shows is that MS is willing to use its considerable clout to get what it wants politically.
Microsoft spends about a billion dollars a month in marketing and dirty tricks like this. These three "Men in Black" are part of that, according to the article, costing a minimum of $100,000 in Florida alone. You pay for it everytime you purchase something from someone who's passed their M$ costs along to you. Slavery is one of the names used for situations where you have to pay and you have no choice due to fraud and force others have used.
What bothers me about your post is that it's the same as the rest of your posts -- all you ever really say is "haha M$ is PWNed". ... In all, I'm not surprised to see the same post from you as always -- but I'm also sure you actually have interesting and insightful observations. Why not bother thinking a bit before you post and include them in your comments?
My message is as constant as reality, try arguing with something of substance rather than my supposed writing style, history or personality. You can't really, because there is little of substance behind M$. The people of Florida will be better off with Open Formats but M$'s dirty tricks would keep them from even discussing the issue. This is a game M$ can't really win.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
If we're going to allow campaign contributions, is there a possible way to seperate the money from any sense of obligation to the donor? Some organization should be set up to collect campaign contributions and distribute them to the campaigners with the money having since been cleansed of any information as to who gave it or why. Donors would get a receipt that they gave money to a political campaign for tax return purposes, but should not have proof of which campaign so they couldn't take their receipt to the campaigner and ask for something in return.
Doing things in return for possible future contributions should be a red flag anyway. If you need all that money to win an election, and can't win without it, maybe you're just the wrong guy for the job, especially if you already have it. Anyone who voted against this text for the reason of future campaign contributions should be fired immediately.
OK, if no one outside this organization can know how much money goes where there's chance that people inside could divert things to the wrong campaigns and no one outside would know or have proof. But I would like to remove the idea of obligation in return for "contributions" in politics.
Maybe a system where each campaigner gets an equal amount of money from a generic contribution pool would be more fair. Maybe not. What about other ideas?