Forum to discuss and answer questions on Enterprise Agreement

[Robert Bushman]

I will be RSVP'ing after I get approval from my
boss this morning.

On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Trent Shipley wrote:

> 1)  The County is in violation of State and County regulations.
> Specifically, Microsoft is a a convicted monopolist.  The County can't do
> business with monopolists.
>
> (NOTE WELL: to carry the case you better have lawyers there.  The county will

No offense Trent, I'm new here, but I don't see you
in my recent archives (and my DSL is acting flakey,
so I can't check the PLUG site). Are you from
Microsoft? Please forgive me if I'm off base, but
this sounds like a troll to me.

First off, I think the law only states that
the county has the option of refusing to deal with
convicted abusive monopolies. Second, twisting
arms into compliance is almost never the right idea,
and is extremely dangerous if you are not sure how
much power you wield (which in this case, I feel
we do not) - only a person in a position of
significant power, who doesn't mind damaging the
relationship, should rely on adversarial tactics.

IMNERHO, the right thing to do at this stage with the
legal issue is to hint at it and let them consider
it on their own. Taking a hard-line adversarial
sounds pretty unpleasant to me. They will be far more
receptive to us if we are collaborators/supporters.

We should be looking for a way to help our community
leaders solve a problem. Furrow our brows and express
our sympathy about a major vendor, who provides a
product that our government has become dependant on,
who is an abusive monopoly and is charging
extortionate fees.

County has the very same concerns, but feel that there
is no way out. They will ask, "OK, so we know this is
a problem. But PLUG, what are you suggesting?"

Then we say, "Linux can be part of the solution.
We're here to help, friend. We believe in this
community and we believe in you. Together, we can
solve this problem. Let us show you the way out."
(hmm, did Microsoft patent "the way out"? haha)
(hrm, moment of clarity - I bet that *is* why they
trademarked "the way out" - because it works so
well for our side </conspiracy_theory>)

They will then bring up some Microsoft FUD. We
must not lose our cool at that point. We have to
answer their questions calmly, rationally, and
simply - such that there is no denying that we
have a point. EG: "Bill says opening source causes
terrorists to attack your networks" - we respond that
open source has a better security track record, and
Microsoft has just announced that they will open the
core of their new security product, "Palladium."

At the end, they will probably look for a commitment
from us to "be there for them." We should tell them
about PLUG-discuss, and agree to do everything we
can to help make the transition easier.

If at the end they say, "OK, we gave you your fifteen
minutes. Now get the hell out of our office." Then
we think about adversarial tactics - but I find that
extremely unlikely. They're just people like us,
trying to do their jobs well.

Next year, we ask them the same question again. Ask
what we can do to help our community leaders escape from
the abusive monopoly. They know what the problem is;
they just don't believe that there is any alternative.

Get them to share our desire to escape from Microsoft,
to feel like we're on the same team, then provide
them with the information, tools, and assistance to
start the migration.

After all - these are politicians we are talking about.
Playing politics is not my way - I'm a hacker, I prefer
to state the undeniable facts; that should be enough.
Unfortunately, if a typical human doesn't share your
desire to see the truth, it doesn't matter how true it
is.

> How much is *retraining* going to cost.
>
> I've used Linux and Windows and Windows is *much* easier to work with.
> Linux and its tools also tend to have a lot more anoying bugs that the
> comercial stuff.  The saving grace seems to be that the *nix architecture
> tends to keep my OS up and running--provided that the user knows the tricks
> to take advantage of that fact.
>
> Even so, I wind up restarting Xfree pretty often.

Look, friend, if you're new to Linux, we're
here to help you too. It sounds like you've got
some bugs in your system. Is it an old distro?
Are you using really old or really new hardware?
Are you running a lot of alpha and beta software?

What you're describing sounds like a severely
malfunctioning system - a bunch of things must
have gone wrong, but we can help you straighten
it out.

>  The fact that I don't have
> to reboot the machine is pretty irrelevant--restarting the X windowing system
> is the moral equivalent of rebooting the work station.

???

Well, we can help you learn more about the
architecture of computing systems too if you
want. EG: The GUI is the tiny little layer on
top of all the important stuff. As standardized
in the MVC model, the visual representation of
a system is only one small component of the
system as a whole.