microsoft buys the UN?

http://www.iht.com/articles/130732.html

Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, won praise in January when he trumpeted a company agreement to give $1 billion in software and cash to the United Nations as part of a job-training program for the developing world.
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But Microsoft did not seek any attention for a much smaller contribution earlier that paid some travel expenses for a UN business-standards group. That payment, critics say, had a more opportunistic motive than the donation.
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A number of software industry executives and technologists contend that Microsoft has been vigorously moving behind the scenes to undercut support for a set of standards for business-to-business electronic transactions that were jointly developed by the United Nations and an industry-backed group.
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Microsoft and senior UN officials reply that the accusation is false, saying that the company's contributions were relatively modest, complied with UN guidelines and did not unduly influence decision-making within the body.
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Microsoft and International Business Machines have been attempting to gain backing for a competing approach to writing Internet software, which the two companies argue would be a better, more general solution for business-to-business computer communications than the original UN-developed standard, known as ebXML. The previously hidden dispute may seem arcane, but it revolves around computing standards that are likely to help determine control over a new generation of software designed to automate buying and selling through networks of computer connections. Many industry executives say they believe the new software, which falls under a category known in the industry as Web services, will supplant computer operating systems as the linchpin of the industry.
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This new fight comes as Microsoft, the No.1 software company, moves to the final stages of its legal dispute with European antitrust regulators over its right to integrate features of its competitors' products into its Windows operating system. On another front, Microsoft is being challenged by a growing array of open-source programs - starting with Linux but expanding to other arenas - being developed by loosely organized groups of software programmers and distributed at little or no cost.
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Several of the technologists who have participated in the UN-supported standards-setting effort said the dispute marked a critical new stage in the long-running warfare between Microsoft and its competitors over what they see as Microsoft's overly aggressive business practices.
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Microsoft executives said that their critics were complaining only because they were in danger of being left behind by the Microsoft-IBM push in Web services, which the executives said would be based on standards that did not give the two companies any commercial advantage over others. "This was about industry momentum more than anything else," said Steven van Roekel, Microsoft's director of platform strategy. Microsoft says it helped pay travel expenses of the group as part of its effort to gain support for its system. "We have been evangelizing Web services," van Roekel said, "and we view this as part of that."
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Microsoft's critics point out that Microsoft did not initially participate in the development of the open ebXML standard, which does not require users to rely on the company's proprietary BizTalk Server product line. The standard was originally developed as a low-cost alternative to a traditional business-to-business computer standard called Electronic Data Interchange.
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But as the new standard started gathering considerable support in Asia and Europe, they say, Microsoft began to mount its own effort to blunt its momentum. Despite that, ebXML was recently adopted by the Pentagon.
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Last month, the dispute moved beyond the insular world of technical standards-setting experts when Jean-Pierre Henninot, a French official who represented his country in the earlier effort, wrote a letter charging that the UN Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business, known as UN/Cefact, was privately turning its back on the ebXML. standard.
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The letter, which will be discussed at a UN meeting this spring, was prompted in part by a decision last August by the UN group to end its cooperation with the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, or Oasis, the industry standards body with which it jointly developed ebXML.
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Critics accuse Microsoft of driving a wedge between the two groups by quietly providing financial support to several members of the UN body.
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According to a number of people involved in developing the ebXML standard, Microsoft first hired two members of a small subcommittee of the UN group in late 2002 and early last year. In March of 2003, a Microsoft employee introduced a new software framework for electronic business to the UN subcommittee as an improvement on ebXML.
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The issue recently came to a head after Microsoft's opponents learned that the company had paid the travel expenses of three UN committee members to Europe and Asia. In September the officials, including two Microsoft employees also serving on the committee, traveled to six countries on a trip that critics said was a thinly disguised effort to promote Microsoft and IBM's software alternative for developing Web services, known as the Business Collaboration Framework, or BCF. IBM was not involved in the travel payments.
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Microsoft and UN officials acknowledge that Microsoft helped subsidize the trip, but they had different explanations.
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Ray Walker, the chairman of the UN steering group overseeing the standard setting, said that because two Microsoft employees were part of the technical group, he thought it was important to go along on the tour "to make sure there was absolute transparency."
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The New York Times
Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, won praise in January when he trumpeted a company agreement to give $1 billion in software and cash to the United Nations as part of a job-training program for the developing world.
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But Microsoft did not seek any attention for a much smaller contribution earlier that paid some travel expenses for a UN business-standards group. That payment, critics say, had a more opportunistic motive than the donation.


What a crock. One is just as opportunistic as the other, they are both meant to promote good relations with the UN. not that im a big defender of MS per se but the un people flying were not paying for the travel out of pocket anyway so all this does is save the UN money that they could use on other things or stick in their own pockets as the case may be.

If anyone should be under fire here it’s the UN for accepting contributions from private industry..