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Romania Jails Ex-Minister Over Microsoft Licenses
"A former minister and three others have been handed jail sentences for corruption in Romania in a case linked to Microsoft software licenses," reports Balkan Insight. Prosecutors said the officials had embezzled the entire 47% discount Microsoft offered the Romanian government in a five-year, $105 million contract to supply schools and other public institutions with Microsoft Office licenses. Jail terms up to three years were also handed to a former mayor and two other businessmen who acted as middlemen, and the four defendants were also fined almost 10 million euros. While the court's sentence is not final, "prosecutors said there was manifest corruption in the contract," the article reports, with the officials admitting to the charges in exchange for a one-third reduction in their jail sentences.
Romania Jails Ex-Minister Over embezzlement.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
...and make it a priority to employ people to produce products and services directly.
Public-private partnerships, aka corporatism, aka fascism, makes for the worst corruption.
Isn't it how IT industry sales de facto work, - including kick-backs into contracts?
Everyone is embezzling money from someone. Nothing new there. Shocked... Shocked to find gambling going on in here.
Would the article posted make us think Microsoft is actually doing the prosecuting.
Because you know this is news for nerds, and stuff that matters doesn't include basic scams and corruption on foreign soil.
This is why you need an independent auditing office, that can ask the tough questions to the people at the highest levels and it helps if they have some teeth too. Surely this contract must have gone through some official tender system, I guess that is what revealed this whole problem in the first place. I doubt just one or two people made money off this when it's hundreds of millions.
So, if they are out of paper in a printer, they need to open up a paper mill?
Of course, they will need to open a factory to manufacture the printer too, which would be really cost effective for a limited run of devices...
There is a suck joke in here some where.
LibreOffice would have enabled him to embezzle all $105 million. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Chinese official goaled for NOT pirating microsoft software.
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
and hire competent people to manage the systems, instead of corrupt politicians. You'll get rid of Microsoft, and save money. Don't say you can't write e-mails and write documents and exchange files on Linux-based systems; for every one of your scary stories about Linux, there is an equal scary story about Windows.
With the two large contracts I negotiated, they kept trying to sweeten the deal. If it wasn't for kickbacks, Microsoft would probably lose half of their large deals.
Is you're going to be a pretentious git, you should at least learn how to spell properly.
There is nothing more intellectually dishonest than a counterargument along the lines of, "If you can't do something perfectly, you don't do it at all."
Governments have the resources to adapt and adopt open source software rather than paying MS billions of dollars across the globe.
As for the commanding heights of the economy, paper production might or might not be cost-effective to nationalise. As for printers, given what HP has done to the printer ink market, a non-profit company that produces high-quality long-lasting printers with cheap ink seems to be just what we need - although private industry is just about reversing this stupid trend. Government-owned corporations - either of the European social democratic model or the Chinese model (where the company may have private shareholders but is so heavily regulated by the government in the interests of the country that it essentially belongs to the state) - are most effective.
First I wanted to post this as AC but then decided one day I need to come clean anyway.
I installed Kubuntu including Libreoffice on the missus computer and never told her I took the 100% discount...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Simply make it an offense punishable by life imprionment as well as forfeiture of all assets of you and anyone with in two hops of you for possesion of any microsoft IP, problem solve..
your welcome
It should be illegal for governments to use proprietary software in the first place. Do as you wish as an individual, or a private enterprise, but public data cannot be subjected to vendor lock-in. And as governments are supposed to serve the public good (wishful thinking much?), they should promote the development of Free software.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Bribes and all, yeah, lovely, but when is Microsoft going to drop support for its proprietary, closed, inferior Microsoft XML .docx and the like?
Governments have the resources to adapt and adopt open source software rather than paying MS billions of dollars across the globe.
Are you kidding?
Government IT always follows the same: each department/agency/division has their own IT turf that they protect against other department/agency/division, until some starry-eyed moron convinces the big cheese that having a central IT group would lower cost and could even become a profit center. At which point the central IT group becomes a nest of corruption showered with gifts from vendors, and every department/agency/division is charged ridiculous amounts of money for inferior or irrelevant products and services. So each department/agency/division starts special projects and bundles IT services in those, slowly recreating individual turfs. Rinse and repeat.
lucm, indeed.
Just for fun call the US GAO and ask them to give you a ball park figure as to how much public money is wasted in the federal government. The answer is: they have no fucking idea how to even start figuring out an answer. The only true answer they can give is that there's 1/2 billion wasted each year in having a GAO.
lucm, indeed.
IT always follows the same: each department/agency/division has their own IT turf that they protect against other department/agency/division, until some starry-eyed moron convinces the big cheese that having a central IT group would lower cost and could even become a profit center. At which point the central IT group becomes a nest of corruption showered with gifts from vendors, and every department/agency/division is charged ridiculous amounts of money for inferior or irrelevant products and services. So each department/agency/division starts special projects and bundles IT services in those, slowly recreating individual turfs. Rinse and repeat.
That's my experience in the private sector, but what happens in the public sector?
The National Weather Service still uses Flash to loop radar sweeps! What the Serious Fuck?