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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.
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".
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.
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.
Corporations shouldn't have rights, so I don't give a shit about what Microsoft's 'rights' are.
Just to comment, I find it ironic that people who claim to be in favor of "capitalism" are often the ones who are in favor of this sort of corporate entitlement. They want the government to guarantee that corporations have more rights than citizens. They want the government to give corporations special monopolies, and take various actions to ensure the profitability of inefficient corporations.
I've been ranting about this a lot lately, but I think it's important: corporations are not entitled to any of this. The government grants formations of corporations for various reasons, but the ultimate reason for that whole system is the benefit of society. However, these entities that we call "corporations" do not have any intrinsic value. Corporations do not have inalienable human rights.
Owing their existence to the pursuit of our society to benefit itself, corporations have no inherent right to subvert the good of society for their own profitability. If corporations act maliciously or irresponsibly, their value is void and they should be destroyed.
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.
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.