Your definition of a slush fund is the same as corporate America's definition of a flexible profit margin. That's why you evidently won't accept any situation where Microsoft provides the low bid: "It must be the illegal slush fund."
Mine would simply say that the government must buy the lowest-cost software available that fits objectively written criteria for the task at hand.
As an example, I'm sure someone could dumb down the requirements for office software bidding so that OpenOffice meets the criteria. But Bush2000 brings up a good point: Useability, retraining, compatibility, productivity all have their costs & benefits which should be factored into any objective criteria.
When an employee is pulling down $50K plus benefits, what employer would forego spending a few hundred dollars per year for the tools to make him more productive? I would say a very short-sighted one. I know I wouldn't want employees eating up my payroll wrestling with 2nd rate, feature-challenged GPL crap like OpenOffice.
This fund is targeted only for situations where Microsoft may lose to Linux, no other. It is specifically targeted to kill Linux at any cost. You didn't have a problem with the large trucking companies driving independents out of business using the same system? In government contracting, such a fund may be illegal, at least as the pricing rules were explained to me while working at a few Fortune 100 IT contracting companies.
I'm sure someone could dumb down the requirements for office software bidding so that OpenOffice meets the criteria.
Show me your average office user, then show me where OpenOffice doesn't meet the requirements, or StarOffice since it's also much cheaper than Office. Most people don't use 90% of what Excel or Word can do. For those few that need it, give it to them. It's the same thing that happens when Windows houses needed abilities that only Macs could do -- you'd find a few Macs running there.
When an employee is pulling down $50K plus benefits, what employer would forego spending a few hundred dollars per year for the tools to make him more productive?
Does Excel make the average user more productive? I don't think so, and I use Excel extensively at work and OpenOffice extensively at home. Switching between the two is easy. A few thousand employees times several hundred each in licenses adds up.
Useability, retraining, compatibility, productivity all have their costs & benefits which should be factored into any objective criteria.
You want to know what the biggest training problems were for Largo? "How can I change my desktop background" and "There's no floppy, so how can I take stuff home?" Application-specific training was almost not needed since for the vast majority of people most of these applications work pretty much alike.