[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux for the State of Texas?

[Daniel Hauck]

Hehehe... Good one!

I just submitted the article to Slashdot to see if we can gain some
recognition on this issue.  I believe that shining the correct political
light on this matter will help to leverage our point of view on this.
Microsoft, the criminal-anti-trust-loser, has given the state of Texas a
very large bill that taxpayers will certainly NOT appreciate.  And if there
is one thing that I know about the taxpayers of Texas, is that they don't
like to pay taxes and there's a great deal of political leverage there...
possibly moreso than in other states who currently have a state income tax.
In this case, the taxpayers are the land and business owners.  Those are the
people who carry political influence in our state and those are the people
currently being offended by Microsoft and those are the people we should
find a way to carry the message to.

Form an inteligent intiative that says "ween ourselves from Microsoft or
face $XXX million each year" in taxes and I believe the results would be
profound.  I personally know one attorney who could represent our interests
in Dallas county... and possibly just for the fun of it!

In politics, timing and public opinion are very important factors.  The
state's IT people will have to put up a very strong argument to stay with
Microsoft.  I happen to know that the state's comptrollers carry a lot more
weight, however.  On Monster.com, I have found an opportunity listed:

http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?jobid=14487962

How appropriate.  It would appear that Tarrant County, a segment of the same
department charged $1.5M by Microsoft, is building a new project using all
Microsoft enterprise servers in conjunction with AS/400's.  That's a LOT of
money spent on something that could very easily be tackled with a free SQL
server system.

This is a chance for those who want to do their part in supporting and
promoting the use and popularity of open-source software who are not
programmers.  Many times I've asked myself "hey, what can you do?"  Here's
something I can do... and something you can do too.  I have written my state
representatives on this matter and I suppose I should also contact my more
local government as well.  The letters do carry weight.  They will carry
more weight if we can get more publicity on this matter as well.

Question:  What aspects could backfire?  Well, Microsoft could be using this
$1.5M bill as leverage to get Texas to buy more enterprise-level licenses.
It wouldn't be unheard of for Microsoft to offer a plan like "buy all this
stuff and we'll forgive you the $1.5M."  Texans don't take it that way
willingly though...  the time is now.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Baker" <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>
To: "NTLUG DISCUSS" <discuss at ntlug.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2002 11:12 PM
Subject: [NTLUG:Discuss] Linux for the State of Texas?


>
> After our discussion of whether Texas should mandate use of
> OpenSource or not, I thought this was a timely article:
>
> http://www.austin360.com/aas/metro/041202/12prison.html
>
> (Basically, Microsoft think the state's prison service owes
> them $1.5M in licensing fees for what seems to me like nothing
> more than poor record keeping.)
>
> Since they don't have any budget to pay this bill, now might
> be a good time to point to Linux and say: "FREE"  (Although
> one could argue that Freedom isn't generally top of the
> Prison service's business practices!  :-)