Hi Folks (and apologies to anyone who receives this via more than one route),

I have just enjoyed reading a letter, described as being sent from Peruvian Congressman David Villanueva Nuñez to Microsoft Peru, in response tgo Microsoft's objections to a Peruvian Govt Bill mandating open-source software for all public bureaux.

It is at:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/19/ ms_in_peruvian_opensource_nightmare

(all one line; also at: http://tinyurl.com/3abgv )

In view of assorted difficulties with proprietary software recently experienced by our own august Lords and Masters,[1] perhaps it may be enjoyable reading for them too.

Enjoy. Best wishes to all, Ted.

[1] For example, the recent HMRC fiasco in which sensitive personal data of about 27,000,000 people were "lost in the post" owed much of its impact to the fact that HMRC staff were unable to extract only the data they needed from their database, unless they paid thousands (about £5,000 I think) to EDS so that EDS could provide them with a different data-selection template to what they had already. So they decided to use what they already had, which pulled out far more data than they should have pulled out.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 27-Dec-07 Time: 18:59:19 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------