The situation gets even worse when pressure is put /on/ the government.
Slashdot published the following item last month
(http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/15/1334248):
mocm writes "The Inquirer has a story about how Bill Gates tried to pressure
the Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen into accepting the European
Union's proposed directive on software patents by threating to terminate
the 800 jobs at Navision, which had been acquired by Microsoft." Update:
02/16 00:41 GMT by T: cfelde points out a CNET story which says that "The
European vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions, Klaus Holse
Andersen, denied on Tuesday that the jobs at Navision were ever at risk."
Believe who you'd like.
--
Roy Schestowitz
http://schestowitz.com
Ian wrote:
> Schools applying for specialist status can now be sponsored by Microsoft.
>
> The rules for specialist school sponsorship are as follows.
>
> 1. Sponsorship should not link to commercial interest in any way
>
> 2. Sponsorship in kind should be valued and be substantiated as worth this
> value to the school.
>
> 3. Supplier sponsors in general need to sign an agreement not to supply
> the school during the life of the specialist school 4 year plan.
>
> Software and consultancy time have been ineligible full stop until the
> DfES set a precedent by allowing Oracle to sponsor schools last year
> valuing their contribution at 25K. Now MS sponsorship is valued at £15k,
> software and a consultant to advise on IT strategy.
>
> Commercial interest? How likely is a MS consultant to provide advice that
> is not locking the school into MS products? With BECTA about to say
> schools can save money by adopting Linux, how likely is a MS consultant to
> advise the school to use Linux or OpenOffice.org?
>
> Valuation of the sponsorship. I talked to a school that has been given
> sponsorship by MS. They said they had most of the software anyway but it
> helped trigger the £0.5m in additional funding. So it costs MS nothing to
> get a firm foothold in this school and a lot of free publicity at
> taxpayers' expense.
>
> Another school had an Open Source project in its plans but when they found
> they had been successful in getting sponsorship from MS they wanted to
> remove it for fear of upsetting the sponsor or that the DfES would fail
> their application.
>
> Future supply. If a school buys a PC it will have a MS operating system on
> it so after the sponsorship starts they will be buying further product
> from MS, something other sponsors are prevented from doing.
>
> If a small British company offered schools sponsorship either in software
> or consultancy it would not be allowed. eg I have an electronic
> registration application I was considering GPLing. I value it at £10k,
> which is not unreasonable in the general market place and I say OK, I'll
> sponsor 100 schools with it so I'm a £1m sponsor. Why is it that my
> sponsorship will be rejected whereas MS and Oracle's is accepted?
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