[Fsfe-uk] Proof of how scared senseless higher ed is of MS

[Paul]

Hi,

Those who followed the Gomeche fun and games on ucol will know that the
little ****er found were I worked. He went to town bombarding them with
emails, phone calls and the such, so much so that his numbers are banned
from there.

Anyhoo, at a disciplinary hearing this week, I was given an oral warning
due to my actions. I will appeal this as the majority of the fun and
games were started and conducted outside of work and what was posted
from work was completely okay to post!

Part of the meeting involved my postings to forums, usenet and the such
and as everyone on here knows, I make no bones about by dislike of a
certain Redmond based company and my signatures reflect that fact. On
one such message board, I stated that Microsod were the biggest
providers of bloat in the world. The message board was not run from any
of my employers servers, so was really out of their power.

One comment was that if MS had found out that an employee had posted
this or as people now know who employs me thought that it reflected
their opinions and M$ found out, that they would come down on them like
a tonne of bricks. I was also asked to stop asking how much various
uni's were giving, sorry, spending on MS licences and making comments on
groups like this & ucol the amount M$ were given by education each year.

I agreed not to do it from a works machine.
I did not agree to change my signature for home postings
I did not agree to stop posting my comments about M$ from home

If M$ want to take the UK Universities to task over the amount they rip
us off to each year, fine by me. I just wish that the likes of UK HE and
FE had the balls to say "no" to M$ and "yes" to the benefits of Open
Source.

That said, the FUD SCO are throwing around doesn't help, especially as
the brain dead pointy haired boss brigade believe any BS that M$ tell
them...

Please excuse my language here - but I am getting extremely pissed off
with the "let me bend over and here's my arse" attitude that the
education sector (as a whole, there are exceptions), health service and
other public sectors take when it comes to those cowboys from Redmond. I
wish the jaded public would wake up and see how much using MS really
costs in lost productivity, extremely expensive licences and badly
broken software. An all time classic quote about this came from my dad.
In an argument I had with him coming back from just outside of Cambridge
a few years back, I was arguing that using anything not from MS would
give companies an advantage as they would be more productive. His reply
was that everyone uses Excel and Word and so the business community had
a level playing field as they were all hindered by the same problems.
Unbelievable. He is now a manager at a health practise within Merseyside
and still has the same braindead attitude to M$.

TTFN

Paul
-- 
One OS to fool them all
One browser to find them
One email client to bring them all
And through security holes, blind them...