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Portugal's Vortalgate — No Microsoft, No Bidding
An anonymous reader writes "Companies using software other than Microsoft's are unable to bid at many Portuguese public tenders. This is due to the use of Silverlight 2.0 technology by the company, Vortal, contracted to build the e-procurement portal. This situation has triggered a complaint to the European Commission by the Portuguese Open Source Business Association; the case is unofficially known in Portugal as 'Vortalgate.'"
No, it's a trap. Use it at your peril.
Slashdot is not homogenous, but a lot of people are very vocal about MS. MS has given them good reason. This is primarily a computing forum and MS has done more damage to various parts of the computing industry via their criminal acts than pretty much any other company. Had Slashdot been around during the bad old days you'd have been claiming it was just an anti-IBM site.
Okay, so this basically makes my point. It's a technology solution. You guys obviously have way better solutions... why don't you just make a better product? It seems open source is just hopelessly choked by unix retardedness.
Who's promoting Flash? This could be done in Java or javascript even using all open Web standards. Failing that, Flash is not being promoted by a criminal organization whose trust gives them direct, financial incentive to break compatibility with other versions. Finally, Adobe pushing the proprietary Flash upon the industry is not illegal since they aren't abusing a monopoly in another market to do it.
Right, what a lame rationalization. Of course, suddenly proprietary junk is okay.
Is it cheaper to use proper development tools and actually get some work done using adobe or Microsoft stuff, or to fight off the horde or morons who attack you in court? Decisions, decisions.
I'd say if MS is beating them without breaking the law... which is highly unlikely if you understand antitrust law. Even then it is debatable.
Oh I see- as far as I can tell it sounds like the crowd here represent the group trying to win a market battle with litigation instead of technical merits. Can't make a better profit so you just dub the competition criminal? Design by committee has always and will always lag behind, web standards like javascript vs tuned solutions like flash and silverlight is just another sterling example of this.
Okay, other people clued you in about this.
No, it was just other random zealots posting on my comment. I maintain that I made a good point, that's why it's considered "flamebait"-- this is not a community of good ideas or linux platform strength, but fanboy anger.
No doubt that is true. Have you violated the same patents that Microsoft is now suing over? I have. My pockets aren't big enough for them to worry about, but if everyone who has small pockets makes something an industry standard, then they'll go after those with bigger pockets who use the standard, just because its a standard. And we'll all end up paying more for anything that uses it. So for us with small pockets, its in our own long term interest to not use it. Unless of course, the short term benefit outweighs the long term penalty.
Well, isn't that a bit dramatic? I mean, unlike SCO or the RIAA, or Alcatel-Lucent, or whatever- Microsoft is still quite profitable serving consumers instead of fighting them. They get money by selling products still... imagine that. Maybe the industry is just running out of ideas but is still hungry for money? I don't see anything new coming out of unixland, that's for sure.
Oh you mean like web standards that are published far faster than any of the browsers can implement? Like IE8 passes Acid2 perfectly and is CSS 2.1 compliant, but now everyone humps on Acid3 and CSS 3?
What do you want to bet that when IE 8.5 or IE9 releases, they'll have Acid4 out? And Firefox/Oprah will have 90% compliance, and IE will have 50% compliance, and everyone will go nuts about how IE doesn't have the newest web standards.
And if you actually look at Microsoft's efforts on Silverlight, they released it for Mac OSX with plugins for Firefox and Safari, and they are working directly with the Moonlight team to provide technical assistance with the implementation. They have done the right thing all the way through on Silverlight.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-05.html