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Microsoft's 'Men in Black' Kill Florida Open Standards Legislation
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Apr 17, 2007 11:43 AM
from the venus-was-at-its-peak-brilliance-last-night dept.
from the venus-was-at-its-peak-brilliance-last-night dept.
A NewsForge article was handed to us talking about pressure Microsoft recently brought to bear on a piece of Florida legislation. A few short paragraphs in Senate bill 1974 added by Rep. Ed Homan discussed the need for open data formats, but Microsoft's men in black responded by pressuring legislators and staff employees about the bill's language. "A legislative staff employee who would lose his job if he were quoted here by name said, 'By the time those lobbyists were done talking, it sounded like ODF (Open Document Format, the free and open format used by OpenOffice.org and other free software) was proprietary and the Microsoft format was the open and free one.' Two other legislative employees (who must also remain anonymous) told Linux.com that the Microsoft lobbyists implied that elected representatives who voted against Microsoft's interests might have a little more trouble raising campaign funds than they would if they helped the IT giant achieve its Florida goals. Note that lobbyists for IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Novell -- the only three companies with a major interest in open source who have registered lobbyists in Florida -- did not weigh in on this matter." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
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IT: Pro-ODF Legislation Loses In Six States 264 comments
ajanp writes "Computerworld discusses the defeat of pro-ODF legislation in the states of California, Florida, Texas, Oregon, and Connecticut which 'would have required state agencies to use freely available and interoperable file formats, such as the Open Document Format for Office Applications, instead of Microsoft Corp.'s proprietary Office formats.' A similar bill in Minnesota was changed to study the issue instead. There was heavy lobbying being done in private on both sides with one problem being 'the jargon-laden disinformation that committee members felt they were being fed by lobbyists for both IBM and Microsoft. Although lobbyists would tell the committee one thing in private, they got cold feet when asked to verify the information publicly, under oath.' However, 'Despite the string of defeats, Marino Marcich, executive director of the Washington-based ODF Alliance, said the legislative fight has only begun.'"
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Just goes to show (Score:5, Interesting)
Run away chain reaction. (Score:5, Insightful)
This just proves how much of a threat MS perceives OO.o and other open source projects.
It also shows the costs of maintaining the monopoly we are all paying. The slave holder gets all tools and income from slaves.
It's a death spiral for M$. The harder they try, the more expensive the monopoly becomes the more people will want to escape. News of this "success" will quickly turn into dozens of challenges. Real successes, where states and businesses actually save time money and trouble by bucking M$, will be promote even more challenges.
It's funny that consideration of any alternative should be considered a "challenge" but that's they way M$ sees it and acts. Kudoos to you, Peter Quinn! The M$ monopoly is on the way out.
An alternative to "M$" (Score:5, Funny)
M$ Defenders Strike Again. (Score:4, Interesting)
What a confused and insulting post. It does not take long for the Microsoft Defenders to act, does it?
s/b: The harder they try, the more extensive the monopoly becomes the more people will be unable to escape.
You can't expand a monopoly, you can only lose it.
It doesn't show any costs to me. What it shows is that MS is willing to use its considerable clout to get what it wants politically.
Microsoft spends about a billion dollars a month in marketing and dirty tricks like this. These three "Men in Black" are part of that, according to the article, costing a minimum of $100,000 in Florida alone. You pay for it everytime you purchase something from someone who's passed their M$ costs along to you. Slavery is one of the names used for situations where you have to pay and you have no choice due to fraud and force others have used.
What bothers me about your post is that it's the same as the rest of your posts -- all you ever really say is "haha M$ is PWNed". ... In all, I'm not surprised to see the same post from you as always -- but I'm also sure you actually have interesting and insightful observations. Why not bother thinking a bit before you post and include them in your comments?
My message is as constant as reality, try arguing with something of substance rather than my supposed writing style, history or personality. You can't really, because there is little of substance behind M$. The people of Florida will be better off with Open Formats but M$'s dirty tricks would keep them from even discussing the issue. This is a game M$ can't really win.
Re:Run away chain reaction. (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? This says nothing; you're just trying to draw an unjustifiable link between MS and slavery."
Quite the contrary. Rather than saying nothing, this statement accurate describes an unfair economic exchange. With chattel slavery, like the system we had in the US, the slave cannot re-negotiate the terms of his ownership, nor can he seek a new master. Similarly, a monopoly is an unfair economic exchange, where choice is curtailed or severely limited.
Re:Just goes to show (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just goes to show (Score:5, Informative)
It winning the competition that is at stake, it is owning the ground on which the competition takes place, and therefore being able to set the rules.
Any time you have a piece of technology that connects two things, owning that technology gives you power over those two things. It's like being a medieval baron with a castle that controls a strategic trade route. It may not be obvious at first, but file formats are a connective technology. They connect the present use of data with the future use of data. An organization that owns a "de facto standard" file format is in the position to directly, dictate which software will be used in the future.
This issue is much bigger than OO.org. If MS does not control the format in which information is saved, then literally anybody can sell software to their customers. It could be OO, it could be Lotus, it could be Sun or Oracle.
As long as they control the format, they can keep their customers on the upgrade merry-go-round, and by extension keep OO.org and others from becoming more significant than they find convenient. They can also forestall the emergence of potentially disruptive technologies, for example intranet based office automation, until it suits them.
It all comes down to the ability of a single vendor to control the future. There is no single point of control that offers a better leverage over the entire software industry than office formats.
Re:Just goes to show (Score:5, Interesting)
Public media WILL NOT pick this up. Microsoft and its partners pays for advertising. If you watch any technological article in the media, you will notice they always side on big business.
Our local newspaper sided on H&R Block with the "free" electronic income tax filing all the way last week. They worded it to say H&R Block was the one who gave consumers this wonderful opportunity. Not trying to take it completely away!
Re:Just goes to show (Score:4, Funny)
I just think there's too much anonymity...
This time I do take note of the messenger.* Very astute indeed. (Hey! new word)
*I'm sure some of you know what I'm talking about
Vote with your dollars. (Score:5, Insightful)
Buy Linux. Buy a Mac.
Getting on Slashdot and whining about this crap is goofy if you're posting from IE, running XP or Vista, running MS Office; and especially stupid if your a corporate decision maker that hasn't at least spend a good amount of time figuring out if you can migrate from MS.
MS's business practices are bad. They're rotten to the core, and that's been proven over and over again. Don't do business with them; take it elsewhere.
It's really not impossible; major corporations have made the jump before, and we're building a first class IT infrastructure that will be MS-free end-to-end.
Stop whinning. Make a decision. Vote with your $$$, and whenever you have a choice don't buy MS.
mmm.. free market (Score:5, Insightful)
When you're done hooking up your home computers with free software, make sure you notify your elected representatives that you know what bribes look like
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
(Just so we're
Buy a mac is the answer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, MS uses all kinds of ethically suspect business practices. But if we were all to buy a mac today and continue to use proprietary formats for our data we'd have accomplished absolutely nothing.
I don't think which OS you use is nearly as important as what formats you use. If we could convince our friends and colleagues that closed formats were unacceptable, and collectively send that message to MS (and Apple, and ...), then things would change. I don't care what OS you use, but it is incredibly aggravating that for no better reason than social inertia I almost have to use .doc formats for my own ideas, at least if I want to share them with my supervisor, journal editors, etc. But once we reject undocumented, closed formats, I don't care what OS and applications you use. If you choose to edit your XML based document in MSWord, that's fine, so long as I can choose to edit that same document in OOo, Abiword, Emacs, ed, awk or whatever else.
'course, if we agreed to use only open formats, then MS would have to start competing on new features rather than the inconvenience of switching to other systems. But you never know, they might be capable of a few good ideas if we force the issue. That's the real point - not to eliminate MS, but to make them serve the needs of their customers, rather than imposing their will on their customers, and everyone their customers interact with.
yp.
Re:"have to use .doc"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, I have to deal with journal editors who require 'word processing' documents, preferably .doc format. I'm not sure why exactly, as they must convert it to something more robust before it gets sent for printing, but at the submission stage it has to be .doc. And my supervisor and several other professional contacts use the 'track changes' option in Word for their comments, which doesn't seem to work with OOo. Thankfully my thesis can be submitted as pdf, so my supervisor is going to have to deal with pdf|rtf|tex for final revisions. She actually prefers to read left-justified double-spaced word documents over tex-formatted pdf output. I think it's a form of 'Stockholm Syndrome'.
As soon as I graduate, and move a step up from the bottom of the academic ladder, it will be time for some aggressive advocacy in favour of at least .odf, if not .tex, for document exchange. Sadly, as a grad student if you don't follow the rules you don't graduate...
yp.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not the point (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not about helping OOo. There is no reason for MS to do anything to help OOo. But if we let the argument get reframed into a MSword vs OOwriter debate we miss the larger picture.
The big picture issue here is maintaining access to our own data. My thesis, in .tex format, could be read by any editor from the past three decades. .doc didn't exist 30 years ago, and even over the timespan when it did there's not guarantee that documents are forward and backward compatible. There's every reason to expect that a .doc file written today will be totally unreadable by any editor available in 30 years time. My .tex file will read just fine.
The point is it's in our best interest to use open formats. MS gets the job done *today*, but at the cost of placing our trust in a notably untrustworthy company. If they change the format they force us all to upgrade to maintain the ability to freely access and exchange our data with each other. MS can choose to change the rules at any time. Or they could just get out of the wordprocessing business altogether, leaving us high and dry.
The fact that 90% of the world currently uses .doc format for exchanging formatted text doesn't preclude improving on that model. I'm not demanding that we all switch to .tex format now, although that would be most convenient for me. I am demanding that we put all public data into a publicly available format. It is a very bad idea to let ourselves stockpile large volumes of information in formats that we don't control. Granted, there is no compelling moral reason to impose this on private individuals, although it would be in their best interest as well in the long run.
Your car analogy is flawed, as they usually are. Proprietary document formats are like books that can only be read when sitting in an approved chair, or under a special light. That may be marginally acceptable when the chair or light is ubiquitous, but it is ultimately an unnecessary restriction. There are better alternatives, so why should we accept such arbitrary limits?
The .doc format isn't really the issue here, it just becomes a target because it is the main obstacle in returning to a situation where we control our own data.
yp.
Buy Linux? (Score:3, Funny)
(Yes, yes, I know, you mean some distry... It just HAD to be said!)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Countless times have I been working on a design, only to find windows feeling like it's BSOD time
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You have to either buy Linux (over-the-counter box) or a Mac in order to not only lower the reven
Heh... (Score:5, Insightful)
So what's taking so long with election reform again?
Money. (Score:4, Insightful)
The people with the political influence want the money.
Neither of those groups include the average person.
"degradation of the political system" (Score:3, Funny)
Last comment in summary (Score:4, Insightful)
What do we expect Microsoft to do? Document standards, in my opinion, are the lynch pin of their entire dominance. Move to open file standards and they are in deep trouble.
Those companies who want to end that dominance need to step up to the plate. Microsoft has a right to withhold campaign funding. They have a right to lobby. But so do their opponents.
But which is best for the CITIZENS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, Microsoft is one of the few American companies that still produces things for export...the government is always going to give them special treatment.
Re:But which is best for the CITIZENS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporations shouldn't have rights, so I don't give a shit about what Microsoft's 'rights' are.
Just to comment, I find it ironic that people who claim to be in favor of "capitalism" are often the ones who are in favor of this sort of corporate entitlement. They want the government to guarantee that corporations have more rights than citizens. They want the government to give corporations special monopolies, and take various actions to ensure the profitability of inefficient corporations.
I've been ranting about this a lot lately, but I think it's important: corporations are not entitled to any of this. The government grants formations of corporations for various reasons, but the ultimate reason for that whole system is the benefit of society. However, these entities that we call "corporations" do not have any intrinsic value. Corporations do not have inalienable human rights.
Owing their existence to the pursuit of our society to benefit itself, corporations have no inherent right to subvert the good of society for their own profitability. If corporations act maliciously or irresponsibly, their value is void and they should be destroyed.
Don't blame the victim. (Score:4, Insightful)
Those companies who want to end that dominance need to step up to the plate.
They have, of course. Netscape, IBM, Sun, Google, Caldera, Red Hat, Novel, and many others have and are doing everything any company should be expected to do. They are producing superior alternatives and offering them at a fair price. It is only because of M$'s abusive anti-trust activities that their sub standard software "dominates" government and business data transactions. In response to M$'s many abusive practices, many of these companies have gone further than they naturally should. Sun has fostered and supports an entire alternative Office Suite, which is M$'s big money earner, as free software and spends real money reverse engineering M$'s dirty tricks. The result is competitive on both features and cost. When M$ blocks this natural competition by legislative tampering, we all lose the benefits of a free market.
The size of those losses is the size of Bill Gates' fortune and the pile of money his company sits on. The cost of all the dirty tricks is rolled up in the billion dollars a month they spend on "marketing." Every dollar they spend comes out of your hide. It's part of the cost of everything you buy.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Open standards, open legislation (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't matter what the rules are, or how many foolish insinuations you can make about your enemies' dress codes, if your legislative process lets you put stuff in without anybody knowing about it.
Someone please explain... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is lobbying just a superset of both those things?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Someone please explain... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't recall the EFF ever having the bags of money that Microsoft has. Lobbying, like so many things, is an economy of scales. The best the EFF can do is try to convince legislators to do what is right by the only people that should even count; the public. Microsoft can do a helluva lot more, mainly by buying friendly legislators and threatening to reduce or eliminate campaign donations for those that don't do what's right. Perhaps what should be considered is that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and perhaps convicted monopolists' ability to talk to politicians should be strictly limited.
Re:Someone please explain... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Lobbying is a legal occupation that pays somewhere in the high-6-figure to low-7-figure range. Bribery and extortion are crimes that often result in prison time and heavy fines and occur when the lobbyist attempts to lobby with insufficient funding.
Re:Someone please explain... (Score:5, Insightful)
The mob corrupts the public by offering games of chance. The state lottery corrupts and fleeces the public by offering games of chance with much worse odds than your neighborhood numbers runner. Of course the states have to make running numbers illegal -- it undercuts their product.
Lobbying is theoretically not like bribery at all. You aren't supposed to give quid pro quos. You just give public servants the benefits of your opinion. You can, in a completely "unrelated" way give modest donations to the candidates who listen to you.
Which is where campaign finance reform comes in.
To understand this connection, you have to separate the role of money in campaigns from the influence of money. Candidates use money to get their message out. Money in politics is a good thing. The problem is the influence of money. Some pigs are not supposed to be more equal than others. Just because I donated $1000, I shouldn't be more worth listening to than some other citizen. So while money in politics is a good thing, the influence of money in politics is a bad thing.
The problem is you cannot get rid of the influence of money by choking off the money supply. In fact you end up throwing out the baby and keeping the bath water. What happens is by the process of elementary economics is that the marginal value of the next dollar becomes much greater. It ensures that obtaining more money is the highest priority of any candidate.
That's pernicious effect #1. Pernicious effect #2 is that while the price political influence is now at all time low in real dollars, campaign finance reform makes the process of moving dollars to where they are needed awkward. Far from favoring the average citizen, it means that highly professional organizations which do influence peddling on an industrial scale are favored.
And, like the state lottery, their competition is illegal. You as a citizen can't walk up to your elected representative and pay him an honest buck to do you a favor. You have to use lobbyists, who don't exactly pay him a buck so much as get rid of a buck's worth of headache for him.
Now, if you want to get rid of the influence of money, there's really only one way to do it. Matching funds. This is not just public funding -- which does not work. In public funding, Candidate A agrees to take public funds and in return limits his spending. This means Candidate B has an incentive to opt out, then raise and spend an unconscionable amount of money. This gives him a clear advantage over A that A cannot match. We can see the uselessness of public funding, which also turns out to increase the marginal value of the next donation dollar. You want your sucker opponents to starve to death on public funding while you feast on special interest donations.
Matching funds works like this. Candidate A raises $500 million dollars to run for president. The United States Treasury cuts a check to the campaign funds of Candidate's B and C, in the amount of $500 million. Except that it will never happen. Nobody will bother taking the time to raise $500 million when their competitors can spend their time on more worthwhile things, and collect their check at the end of the day.
But of course, that would be like the states closing down their lotteries and letting their citizens run a legal numbers game.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Make it so that Microsoft and Lobbyists can't donate a thing. If the shareholders of that company think an issue is important to influence, let them take it out of their own po
Absurd Effort (Score:4, Insightful)
So you see the absurd effort M$ must make to continue it's format monopoly. You can imagine they monitor all state legislators and are ready to send in people like this every time. Because there is such a huge performance and cost difference between M$ and their competitor's products, the "men in black" are going to be very busy.
The only person who has to be more vigilant than a free man is a slave owner.
Monty Python (Score:4, Funny)
Whack-a-Mole (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure Microsoft will get most of the blame here (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who should be receiving scorn are the CAREER POLITICIANS who write legislation in exchange for corporate dollars. Substitute any big corporate interest for Microsoft (Tobacco, Oil, Autos....etc) and you will see that Microsoft is not the only company that engages in these shenanigans.
Sure bitch and whine about Microsoft and how evil they are....you don't have to buy their products.
I would much rather bitch and whine about elected officials that are not doing the jobs they were elected to do.
If they take corporate money - vote the fuckers out.
-ted
Well, maybe. (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, though,
Re:I'm sure Microsoft will get most of the blame h (Score:3, Insightful)
Texas is next, keep an eye on Austin (Score:3, Interesting)
Colorado 41 and Joel Hefley (Score:5, Interesting)
Joel Hefley was a Colorado congressman who was on the house ethics committee. He was responsible for pushing the ethics committee to go after Delay for his numerous abuses. In turn the republicans booted him out. After having spent many years on the group, he came back that the only way to stop all of this is to move to public Financing of campaigns. Then ALL money would be prevented from moving from ANYBODY to a congressman. Many will fight this, and will claim that it violates their first amendment rights. But every time we have put limits on money flow to congressman, it has been approved by SCOTUS. IOW, it would probably pass muster. This would have a nice benefit in that we would get to see how politicians run a campaign on a limited amount of resources. If they fail at it, then we do not want them. They will prove that they are incapable of running a state|country. This would also stop these kind of wil situations where a companies needs are put above the states or even the countries. This is the cheapest way to get back our gov.
Sing along (Score:4, Funny)
Monopoly Defenders
Here come the Men in Black
Cash your party members
This is fucking EVIL.. (Score:4, Informative)
Capitol Office:
317 House Office Building
402 South Monroe Street
Tallahassee, FL 32399-1300
Phone: (850) 488-3087
District Office:
Suite 311
9385 N. 56th Street
Temple Terrace, FL 33617-5505
Phone: (813) 983-3330
Legislative Assistant:
Janet Roder
District Secretary:
Paula Tonelli
Representative Ed Homan,
I am writing to express my extreme displeasure with the recent successful lobbying efforts by Microsoft regarding Senate Bill 1974. As a tax payer of this state I am disgusted that the Congress of this state would cave to the wants and desires of a monopolistic company who have no intentions of serving the people or the state but only seek to increase their already enormous financial wealth. I am huge proponent of open standards and open software. The prospect of having open source software running on government computers is highly desirable. Millions of tax payer dollars could be saved by switching to free operating systems such as Ubuntu Linux (www.ubuntu.com) and switching to free office solutions like OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org). If Microsoft wants to have the governments use Microsoft products, they should donate them to the government and get a tax write off for it. I should not have to pay taxes so government employees can use substandard expensive software. When large monopolistic corporations send lobbyists to ensure the will of the Microsoft is fulfilled I should be able to have faith that my Congress will represent me accurately and realize the lies and untruths these lobbyists are spreading about open source software. Please consider ratifying the bill and rewriting it to embrace open standards and open source software. Thank you.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a dark day when well meaning politicans can't even get ideas in the door without being hassled.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They knew what they were up against, given Microsoft's huge pile of money and fanatic opposition to Open Source Anything, combined with their fellow legislators out-right igno
Peter J. Quinn. (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't exactly strike me as an open or up front method of passing legislation.
Advertising changes to a bill before you add them is not a common method of modifying bills. The process is as open as can be because everyone will get a chance to comment on it later. What's under the table is threatenting legislators to make sure the item is never talked about.
After what happened to Peter J. Quinn, everyone has every right to fear the Men in Black. In that case they:
What policy was that? you might ask. It was simply to use a cheaper, more reliable and more open alternative to M$ Office. Peter Quinn was crucified for thinking his state could save money and have their documents available in digital form 100 year from now if they simply moved away from the M$ domination. For this correct assertion, his reputation and career were damaged.
M$'s efforts are both civil and criminal violation and those responsible should be held accountable.
Re:Criminal? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)