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When the UK government announced plans to shift to the .odf Open Document Format, and away from Microsoft's proprietary .doc and .docx formats, Microsoft threatened to move its research facilities out of the UK.
The prime minister's director of strategy at the time, Steve Hilton, said that "Microsoft phoned Conservative MPs with Microsoft R&D facilities in their constituencies and said we will close them down in your constituencies if this goes through" "We just resisted. You have to be brave," Hilton said.
Although I am not a great lover of Microsoft, I'm not sure that this is any different than many other companies who will try to protect their profits - and, arguably, the jobs of their employees - when they can see the potential for the loss of business. But perhaps other companies are a little more subtle - especially when it is obvious that official papers will one day become public knowledge.
[Editor's Comment: This submission has been significantly edited - comment is not attributable to sigma]
[Editor's Comment: Please see public apology regarding this story.]
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday May 23 2015, @04:01PM
My observation has been that most open standards movements have had a strong nationalist component
There's a grain of truth to this, because open standards are required for competition. If there's an open standard then there are likely to be multiple suppliers that can interoperate with it and so there's a good chance that there will be a local one. For government purchasing, it's often a good idea that your core infrastructure is provided by people that you can haul up on treason charges if they intentionally provide compromised equipment (or, at the least, that security-cleared people can audit). This is not usually possible with a foreign company. Microsoft has provided the source code for Windows and Office to the UK government, kind-of, but not with enough infrastructure to build it, so there's no guarantee that the code that they've provided is the code that's being run. . It's basically only useful for GCHQ to find exploitable vulnerabilities in, not for them to be able to provide defence.
sudo mod me up