Early MASOTY nomination

You will observe that the annual MASOTY awards just occurred in April of this year, and are not yet due. But I simply have to fire 'em up because a certain individual obviously has his eye on a prize:

Most Annoying Senator of the Year: Marc Pacheco, State Senator of Mass.

Memorable Quotes:

"So you're saying Citizens against Government Waste or Americans for Tax Reform are a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft? Is that what you're saying?" ( src)

This in response to a suggestion that since Microsoft provided substantial funding to these groups, one should look critically at their opposition to ODF.

Grover Norquist of ATR, personally received $60,000 from MS in 1999.( src). I have no info on more recent paymentsd, and leave it to the reader to decide how wholly owned they are.

"I am concerned that when I look at proprietary software companies bidding on work under the Open Document standard, if you do have an Open Office format, if you have an Open Office product, and it's an Open Office product which has GPL as one of the elements, then obviously in order to meet the standard then that would mean that proprietary company would have to release its code. That's what I understand. Now tell me where I'm wrong on that."

Let me help you, Marc: Where you're wrong is in getting your notion of what the GPL requires from Microsoft press releases. (e.g. "The GPL is designed to prevent commercial development of software distributed under the license. It does this largely by requiring licensees to make available, at little or no cost, all of the source code for any program that incorporates any amount of GPL code." -- -- which is outright false)

"Again, in keeping faith with what the Open Source community itself has put on the table every time they have approached me about being open, having see-through type of system, democratic process, from what I heard here today we've had far less than a democratic process."

I don't know if he scores a point here or not, because I can't speak about the exact process by which the ETRM was revised. I will say that this illustrates a kinda bad logical leap that I see all the time. Something like "you claim to be all about openness, but look at the front door of your HOUSE! It's closed!" i.e. the fallacy of ambiguous terminology.

It's possible that Kriss et. al. really did sorta conspire to get an ODF-friendly recommendation nto the ETRM. But it's also possible that this was called-for, because public discussion of stuff like this can get noisy and unreliable as people -- even dead people -- spout their usual FUD.