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Ecuador Tax Agency Closes Microsoft Branch Offices
An anonymous reader writes "The Ecuador Tax Agency (SRI) has closed Microsoft branch offices for seven days. 'We have twice requested balances, payment reports and complete tax information, but the company hasn't given it to us, so in accordance with our laws we have proceeded with the closure,' the SRI official in charge of the proceeding said. Microsoft said it was a human mistake."
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Don't know if it's related, but maybe Ecuador isn't too afraid of MS nowadays since they're moving to free software:
http://rudd-o.com/archives/2006/12/13/%C2%A1success-for-free-software-in-latin-america/
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
> Only not with pop-culture. I am interest in things like what Linus is currently
> working on, the direction that Jobs is taking his business, whether Steve Ballmer
> will be finally taken to an asylum to get the anger management that he needs.
With the exception of the Ballmer comment, there's nothing wrong with being interested in those things.
Think of it this way, is it wrong to listen to what Bush says? Or your representative? Of course not, because the decisions these people make affect your life. Being concerned with "the direction that _Bush_ is taking this _country_" is important.
Now certainly Apple isn't as important as the country. However, if you run an apple, the decisions Jobs makes will matter to you. Even more so with Linus and Linux. And with Microsoft's strangle hold on businesses across the world, the "war on Microsoft" is actually in some ways more important than the "war on Terror".
Basically, the argument is that Microsoft didn't cooperate with an audit, so the government doesn't know if they paid taxes or not.
This is a very interesting though as it relates to regional politics. Rafael Correa won his election partly on the promise to clean up corruption in foreign corporate entities (in particular tax evasion and the like). It also has other ramifications for open source, business, economics, etc. in Ecuador. I will be watching this closely.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
This means that for at least seven days, any Ecuadoran corporation that needs Microsoft support is SOL [Sh*t Outta Luck]. That might cause some ripples in the mining industry, for instance.
I don't see how this benefits the worldwide adoption of Vista or Office 2007. This is an entirely new avenue by which a corporate user of Microsoft products might find their operations temporarily "locally orphaned"— that is, without any local vendor support. I'm pretty sure that this event has not been received favorably in Redmond. I'm thinking that it is the kind of event that throws a chair when it bubbles up to the top.
Who would have guessed that when doing comparative risk assessments of OSs and office suites, one of the factors that now needs to be considered is whether the software vendor will comply with local laws?