Forum to discuss and answer questions on Enterprise Agreement

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2002-07-03 at 09:57, Trent Shipley wrote:
> The probability is high that Maricopa County IT is *not* taking this 
> seriously.  That is they view the argument about Monopoly rules as a PR and 
> legal hassle to be finessed, and the Linux/Free Software community as an 
> annoying collection of libertarian hacker ne'er-do-wells.
> 
> Prediction:
> 
> Paul Allsing, Deputy CIO, Maricopa County holds a forum.  Its point is 
> three-fold.
> 
> 1) Allay any concern that the County is in violation of its own procurement 
> rules.
> 
> 2)  Contain the Linux PR nuisance.
> 
> 3) Take the measure of the Linux activists against future interaction with 
> the rabble nuisance.
> 
> 
> In short, County IT's goal is to accomplish precisely nothing with the forum 
> except to have the *nixen rabble leave with a warmer fuzzier feeling--or if 
> that is not possible, have us leave well aware that County IT is 
> professional, is sure of its strategic policy, and is assured by counsel that 
> its procurement policies are entirely legal ... so we can take our 
> enthusiastic hacker selves and go suck eggs.
> 
> 
> What do you want to bet that Paul Allsing is Deputy CIO for Customer Service 
> and Public Relations?
-----
And if that all weren't enough...they can change the rules and get the
board of supervisors to change the law about de-barring monopolies if
they wanted to.

There should be a multi-pronged approach.

1. Microsoft has been proven to be a monopoly and therefore shouldn't be
considered in any future purchases.

2. There are alternative OS's available that can serve the needs of the
county at lower licensing costs.

3. The interests of the citizen's of this county would be well served by
their converting the desktops and servers to linux despite the fact that
the IT departments within the county will resist change since they
already have some investment in the Microsoft technology. Migration from
Microsoft to open sourced OS & Application services is occoring all over
the world already.

Craig