Microsoft plays Massachusetts Senate card

ACCUSATIONS are rife that the software giant Microsoft has not given up on getting rid of the State of Massachusetts's plans to shift all its documents to the open source standard OpenDocument (ODF).

Last week an amendment which would have would have removed the power of the State to set state wide IT standards and enabled the ODF project to be killed off was dropped. This lead many to believe that the ODF was a done deal.

However, this week Vole gave Massachusetts high schools and universities more than splashed out more than $30 million worth of IT gear. This works out at $800 per student, and $2,400 per college kid. This is a huge amount of dosh, by education donation standards, in what is a very small US State.

According consortiuminfo.org, which has a deep throat in the Senate, the donation means that the infamous amendment could come back in a less public form.

Apparently this time it would be as an attachment to the Senate version of the current fiscal budget. Vole has a friend in the Senate Post Audit and Oversight Committee. Marc Pacheco, is famous for being the bloke who put the OpenDocument champion CIO Peter Quinn through the wringer. The amendment could go through without anyone noticing.

Is the Volish donation and the sneaking in of the amendment related? Consortiuminfo seems pretty certain that in election year the events are.

Nothing wins votes more than being able to cut your budget thanks to a hefty donation from a big corporate donor, while at the same time Vole gets what it wants by somewhat unpublicised means. µ

L'Inq
consortiuminfo.org