Waldo Jaquith, who is a distant cousin of mine (as far as we can tell), has again stepped on some rather big toes. This time, instead of pissing off Mattel, he got some special attention from Microsoft.
State agencies largely use commercialy availible software products, at a huge expense to taxpayers. This seemed rather piggish to Waldo, who wondered why they didn’t consider using open source software, which is availble free of charge. So he did something. In January, a bill was introduced in Virginia that would have encouraged the Virginia Information Technologies Agency to consider open source software. Microsoft flew in a representative and some lobbyists, and the bill was squashed.
Go check out The HooK’s story, or read Waldo’s post.