Slashdot Mirror
IBM Suspended From US Federal Contracts
theodp writes "IBM has been temporarily banned from receiving future contracts with federal agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed on Monday. The suspension went into effect last Thursday due to 'concerns raised about potential activities involving an EPA procurement,' the agency said in an e-mailed statement. Under a reciprocal agreement among federal agencies, when one issues a ban, the others follow it. The EPA said it will not comment further on the matter. An IBM spokesman said he had no immediate comment. 'You don't see this very often, particularly for large companies,' commented a stunned industry analyst, mentioning a bankrupt MCI as a notable exception. IBM earned an estimated $1.5 billion in revenue from federal prime contracts in fiscal 2007."
Lots of slashdotters bitch about tags. But today, tags are your friend. Today, I'm looking for the tags omgponies and aprilfools to know if stories are hoaxes, and !omgponies and !aprilfools to know if they are real.
Now, this story was just tagged !omgponies, but that tag is gone now. Ugh.
Posting a story like that would be a sure-fire way to make Big Blue's stock drop like a hot rock, and you'd have shareholders on your arse faster than GNAA members at an orgy.
If the SEC thought it had been done with the intent of manipulating the market for gain, though, you'd be wishing that it was just shareholders and the GNAA after your arse. Coz there'd be a strong likelihood that your arse would become property of Bubba.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
I work for the professional services arm of one of IBM's direct competitors.
Trust me - they are all trainwrecks-for-hire.
So, what appallingly illegal and unconstitutional thing did the government ask IBM to do?
That's absurd - this has nothing to do with Microsoft, because Microsoft is not a player in federal government IT consulting. The major players are IBM, Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, etc. Microsoft has nothing to do with this.
What I suspect is that EPA blew a whistle without realizing that - due to this agreement in place between federal agencies - it would cut IBM out of new federal work altogether. That's almost certainly overkill - no one wants to take one of the major players out of the game just because of corruption at tiny, inconsequential EPA (sorry guys, but EPA is a very small fish in federal government).
You know the world is going to crap when slashdot readers blindly click on links without looking at the URL they are headed for.
What a load of horse hit. IBM is not nor has it ever been the greatest champion of Open Source. They support it with some basic lip service and only keep contributing because of what they are able to pull out at the current point in time is more profitable to them than not being involved, if that changes they will drop Open Source like a smelly turd in a nanosecond. IBM still has some of the biggest closets of closed source applications of ANY company in the world and they have no intention whatsoever of opening them up to the likes of the Open Source community. I can only believe you are some kind of IBM shill as no one could possibly believe the horse shit you just typed.