Slashdot Mirror
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, $105 million contract to supply schools and other public institutions with Microsoft Office licenses. Jail terms up to three years were also handed to a former mayor and two other businessmen who acted as middlemen, and the four defendants were also fined almost 10 million euros. While the court's sentence is not final, "prosecutors said there was manifest corruption in the contract," the article reports, with the officials admitting to the charges in exchange for a one-third reduction in their jail sentences.
With the two large contracts I negotiated, they kept trying to sweeten the deal. If it wasn't for kickbacks, Microsoft would probably lose half of their large deals.
Romania Jails Ex-Minister Over embezzlement.
Yeah, but they had to throw Microsoft in the title because this is /. after all. Microsoft discounts are immaterial to this case, but it helps it get posted here. These guys stole money by committing fraud. I'm sure they tried to hide their tracks in a number of different ways before finding this latest trick that got them caught.
> Correction: Romania Jails Ex-Minister Over embezzlement.
And what do you think that lower TCO for proprietary software was about?
"Be dumb because it's cheaper in the short term." Duh! Just buying that kind of talk is indicative of less transparency -- at least.
Having worked at an M$ shop, I can assure there are reasons to buy Microsoft: because they create so many incompatibilities that shills start to say "it's a Microsoft network". There's no such standard, but given enough "tweakings" you can transmute Ethernet into a different beast.
I miss a more solid Linux offering for corporate desktops; I wonder what is the best option for that these days. There's too much hoopla about end-user gorgeous alternatives, but we get to know very few details about Red Hat Enterprise Desktop, Open Suse and the like (I'm not talking about Fedora or any other community version). Besides not much discussion, many are paid and thus really difficult to discuss / explore / test / enhance etc.
Kudos to Germany for flipping the bird to M$(*) or Romania for having the spheres to finally putting someone in jail. IMHO, if we started to do that long ago there would be less problems in IT.
Next time you have to go through hoops and loops to make Libreoffice compatible with M$ Office, think about why it's costly to do all that. Think why your organization cannot define a freely available format like ODT, make some fonts standard which are not from Microsoft or Apple (hint: there's a lot, many even are free), use inter-operable formats like pdf. Think why everyone must do extra-work to appease Microsoft.
(*): I write M$ to make clear it's not a tech company. If you find that childish, well, that tells us a lot about how you were when younger, isn't it?