Massachusetts OpenDocument man in corruption allegation

THERE ARE all sorts of political knifings going on after Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, and his appointed CIO, Peter Quinn decided to shift the State away from Microsoft office to OpenDocument.

The Boston Globe is reporting that Quinn could face corruption charges after he had not correctly reported trips to various open source conferences, here.

The implication from this yarn is that Quinn had been bribed by the Open Sauce movement into adopting OpenDocument in favour of Microsoft Office.

The story was pointed out to the Globe by a "source in the state government" who claimed that Quinn should have listed all the companies that sponsored the conferences, to allay fears that these companies were trying to gain underhanded influence.

The Secretary of State is one William Galvin, a Democrat, who has already announced that he is opposed to the plan to move to OpenOffice. Some of the Open Source blogs say that Galvin is batting for Vole, but so far there has been a shortage of proof.

As far as the corruption charge goes, Andy Oram, an editor for O'Reilly Media, here, managed to track down Quinn's former boss, Eric Kriss, which surprisingly the Globe did not.

Kriss said that most of Quinn's trips occurred after Massachusetts made the decision to adopt OpenDocument. There was no possibility that the trips would influence the decision that had already been made. The trips were invites to speak at Open Source conferences because Massachusetts had made its decision and wanted to know all about it.

These trips were normally squeezed in on weekends around his normal duties and represented a contribution of his free time to the community and didn't cost that much. Far from being junkets they are the sort of thing that looks as dull as hell. µ