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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.
Which is a problem you don't have, right?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
The parent poster has it closer to the truth.
The media is not liberal or republican. It is pro "local power brokers and business people".
The media may play with being liberal or republican on the editorial pages but where it really matters, they squash, bury, or front page and highlight news as desired by the local elite.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Maybe - and this is just a wild guess - people grow tired of the mindless hyperbolic "M$ IS TEH ZUX" mantra, the unecessary lies and dumb generalizations backed up with lots of irrelevant links that the people who mod you up obviously never bother to pull up. Maybe it's that simple, and not as complicated as your weird theories of a vast "M$" conspiracy designed to stalk you personally on teh interwebs.
Just a thought.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Nice. I sometimes wonder if Twitter is a real person - it doesn't seem possible.