Slashdot Mirror
EU Will Not Divulge Microsoft Contracts
Elektroschock writes "Marco Cappato, a Liberal member of the European Parliament, wanted to inspect the EU's contracts with Microsoft. His request was denied. '...the [divulging] of [this] information could jeopardize the protection of commercial interest of Microsoft.' Apparently the European Council sees no clear public interest in the release of such contractual material, and so 'the Secretariat general concludes that the protection of Microsoft's commercial interests, being one of the commercial partners of the European institutions, prevails on the [divulging] for the public interest.'"
[Blocked] It has been determined that the contents of this comment do not serve the public interest.
-The Secretariate General-
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Nor is this a Microsoft issue; even if that's the only way to get it onto slashdot. Generally no contractual information like this is ever revealed; the UK government (for example) always refuses requests like this, even when people try to find out how much failed systems, or failed buildings cost.
The US government is actually quite open, more open then you realize. Only when it comes to military/security information US is quite about it. Just tune to CSPAN 1,2,3,4,5... and you can watch most everything that is happening with the legislative area of our federal government, and every law passed or failed. Know what the debate was etc... It is that most of us are to lazy to actually look at the information and say it is a closed government. No they won't tell the general public about their brand new airplanes that can fire a laser at a top secret satellite to have it bounce back and kill a target half way around the world. But for the laws that get passed there is actually good transparency and I bet if you needed to you can find out how much they are paying Microsoft for their licenses.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How the hell you link this to socialism is beyond my comprehension. I don't think you know what the word means.
It's not in the public interest to know how much public money MSFT is getting and for what?
That's not what is being claimed. The information IS in the public interest -- the argument is that Microsoft's commercial interest is MORE IMPORTANT than the public interest. Which I think is even worse-sounding that what you said.
*THAT* is likely to be the correct answer. Microsoft plays very fast and very lose with their pricing when threats to their monopoly are encountered. My guess is that their prices dipped to near-zero while they were being prosecuted in European courts in order to help influence opinion about Microsoft... and/or possibly fluctuations may be observed around the time that OOXML was up for ISO vote as well.
In Sweden contractual information has to be made public when dealing with the government, punsihable by criminal law.
Sucks to live in the UK.