-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 To: The Honorable Mayor of Munich (Muchen), Mr. Christian Ude. Allow me to introduce myself. I am an American. My name is Curtis Rey. I have become aware that Mr. Steve Ballmer has recent held a confidential meeting with you concerning the use of Microsoft products. I would like to say that I strongly urge the Mr. Ude to consider an alternative. Namely, a native Operating System produced in Germany. The company I am referring to is SuSE Linux. I find that SuSE Linux is a very stable environment to do my computing. It is also very cost effective. I use SuSE Linux as my primary desktop operating system. I am not involved in the computer technology industry. I am a health care practitioner. I use Linux because I find it to be vastly superior in regards to security and very stable in comparision to Microsoft products. I am fairly confident that you may be wondering why an American citizen would be contacting you regarding a matter internal to the government of Munich and Germany. The reason I felt compelled to contact you is my concern regarding Mr. Ballmers conference with you. I can safely assume that he made a very compelling and persuasive argument regarding the advantages to using Microsoft products. However, there I am also fairly confident that there are a good many things he may have omitted or "glossed" over. SuSE Linux is a native company to Germany as I know your aware. The state of Linux development is growing at an expedential rate. At present Linux is far more affordable than anything Microsoft can offer, regardless of statements to the contrary Mr. Ballmer may have made. The service and support you would get from SuSE Linux would be prompt and effecient. I am very very confident that technical experts from SuSE would be at your beck and call. The contract you would be able to negotiate would more likely be more flexible, cost effective, and the ROI (return on investment) would be much sooner than you would have from Microsoft products. I strongly urge your staff to contact representives of SuSE AG and consult with them to this end. I personally think that doing business with Microsoft would be costly in terms of cost for maintaining and securing your essential data and infrastructures. Microsoft has a very poor track record related to security and stability. Despite their continuing efforts the present state of patching for the vunerabilities of Microsoft products often and regularly exceeds one major patch every one and one half weeks. This alone will mandate an often exorbinant amount of your manpower and resource just trying to keep your systems up to date, secure, and running properly - and my discussions with many many network and information service administrators informs me that this is often impossible to do. The optimal solution your city is seeking is right at your doorstep. Though not an employee of SuSE Linux AG, I can say with confidence that SuSE will provide your staff with the best support you be able to find from any other vendor. The fact that Mr. Ballmers has flown all the way from Redmond Washington in order to persuade you to consider his company's offering says volumes in my mind regarding the underlaying reason for him to do so - that being that many top rate companies in the U.S (such as very very prominent Wall Street firms and various industry leaders) have opted not to subscribe to Microsoft products and licenses. Linux is gain in such a manner that Microsoft is feeling a tremendous amount of pressure and has stated the Linux is their number one threat. There's a reason for this, and it's not because Microsoft is offering a better product. Thank you for your time. Respectfully. Curtis Rey -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+kde/7WVLiDrqeksRAr3JAKC2dOYuBl5/I9crGjsSnmznXt5XcACgnpr4 BfqISQjj2xR+jxSet7W+89k= =GkCR -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----