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.

Comments

Correction

[penguinoid]

Romania Jails Ex-Minister Over embezzlement.

Re:Correction

[Sax Russell 5449D29A]

He'll probably write a couple of books in the months to come.

Re:Correction

[WarJolt]

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.

Re:Correction

[Teun]

I believe the MS part is significant for transparency as a 47% discount means their catalogue price is fully unrealistic and others should be able to follow up.

Re:Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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?

Should have switched to LibreOffice.

[Gravis Zero]

LibreOffice would have enabled him to embezzle all $105 million. ;)

Micrisoft encourages this sort of thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Micrisoft encourages this sort of thing

[Anonymous Coward]

My old boss was busted for accepting $50k to switch our state department to SharePoint. We wasted a ton of money and couldn't even get it to version files correctly.

Re: Micrisoft encourages this sort of thing

[lucm]

I got three nights in Vegas since the department of education I worked for was considering SharePoint. It almost killed me, but it was great fun.

Pace yourself, and always have ice in your drinks (helps with dehydration), and you'll last a whole week before almost dying in Vegas.

Not just in the ex eastern block

[Teun]

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...

Re:Not just in the ex eastern block

[Anonymous Coward]

I once installed Ubuntu on my GF's laptop.

She booted it and gave me a puzzled look, "You-bunt-oo?"

I shrugged, "That's Swahili for Windows".

She beamed with joy, "Oh! I heard about this. It's, like, an expensive version where some money also goes to Africa!? You're such a nice guy."

She still proudly uses the "Windows of the Developing World", and I keep reaping the benefits of her "upgrade" for myself -- I never had the heart to tell her it cost me nothing and her misunderstanding was over a bad joke.

Captcha: Consent.

Governments shouldn't use proprietary software

[Stormwatch]

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.

Re:Governments must stop paying private industry..

[lucm]

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.

Re:Corporate corruption meets government corruptio

[lucm]

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.