WASHINGTON If youre trying to mobilize conservatives to get angry about an obscure provision of a bill moving quickly through Congress, you might as well try and tie it to someone like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

Who cares if she had little to nothing to do with it?

Warren is a hard-charging progressive advocate of consumer rights and government intervention in the economy. Shes exactly the type of politician who makes Republicans hair stand on end. So why not blame it on her ? Thats what it looks like one corporate lobbying campaign did in an effort to protect its profits.

Oracle, the California-based software company, appears to be behind the lobbying campaign using Warren as its foil. The campaign targeted Warren as the supposed source of a provision added to the National Defense Authorization Act that would encourage the Department of Defense to use open-source software for non-battlefield purposes.

Open-source software refers to computer programs for which the source code is both transparent and available for use and reuse by anyone, for any purpose, under the conditions defined by a given license. This is different from the proprietary software often purchased by government agencies, where the agency does not have access to the source code.

For proprietary software, the agency must go back to the company that sold the software and pay for any upgrade, update, patch or fix needed to maintain continued operations. The proprietary model often means that one company has a monopoly on knowledge of military and government systems.

In fiscal 2017, Oracle and its subsidiary companies received nearly $100 million in contracts from the Department of Defense for the use of their proprietary software. In a 2013 white paper , Oracle publicly stated its position against the use of open source by the Department of Defense. The adoption of open-source software preferences could very well provide cheaper and more flexible options for government agencies and thus threaten the companys bottom line. Recently, Britains National Health Service dropped Oracles proprietary database software for an open-source alternative, saving 21 million pounds ($28.1 million).