Recent governmental plans in several European countries to buy proprietary software for public administration or education have caused concerns over the methods used and the lack of public discussion over the decisions.
18 open source companies (including Red Hat) have challenged successfully in the Federal court a three-year contract between the Swiss Federal Bureau for Building and Logistics (BBL) and Microsoft for the provisions of Windows desktops and applications, including support and maintenance. The total value of the contract was estimated at about 27.8 million euro.
The preliminary ruling of the Federal court from 28 May 2009 was based on the fact that the BBL disregarded the procurement rules and did not issue a call for tender. A future final positive decision of the court could mean that the contract will be canceled and a public auction call needs to be made.
Just a few days before the court decision, another similar case was raised by the Swiss open source advocacy group ch/open. They have presented the situation in the Bern canton, where a 18 million euro contract was attributed directly for Microsoft software licences, without a public auction.
Ch/open criticized the lack of transparency of the deal and explained the current action: "Without any public process, contracts are awarded to a proprietary software vendor. This makes public administration increasingly dependent on Microsoft, giving it again no other option in eight years time."
This deal will be debated in the canton's Parliament by the parliamentary group on digital sustainability that has the main scope to increase the use of open source by Swiss public bodies.
Another government-related project that created rumors was the Spain government decision to install Microsoft software on the 420 000 laptops for students. After the Spanish Socialist Party supported the idea that laptops should be equipped with Open Source software, the Microsoft's chaiman Bill Gates and Spain's Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero met on 26 May 2009 to decide on the new software for this project.
The project was criticized even earlier this year by open source organisations such as Hispalinux that pointed out that there was no public tender on this topic.
Similarly, in a different corner of Europe, the Romanian Government has announced that it has mandated the Ministry of Communications to buy Microsoft licences of 100 million euros for the Ministries and Governmental Agencies in the period 2009-2012. Although the government press release talks about obtaining these licences through a possible auction, there is a clear-cut signal on who will be the winner.
"The Romanian Government seems out of touch with reality" has been the harsh comment by Lucian Savluc, the organizer of the third national open source conference eLiberatica that took place in Bucharest in the second part of May 2009.
Georg Greve, the president of Free Software Foundation Europe and a speaker at the same event, commented on the situation: "Microsoft's deals in new EU member states have raised concerns over corruption before, e.g. in Bulgaria. But while Microsoft seems to raise such questions more often than others, it should be noted that the problem of illegal procurement is larger and not limited to Microsoft. Nor is the problem limited to the new EU member states, as the recent irregularities and resulting antitrust complaint filed in Switzerland demonstrate. (...) It seems ironic that the European Commission has to fine Microsoft repeatedly over sustained monopoly abuse, then transfers part of that money to Romania, which enjoyed the highest level of financial support ever granted to a candidate country in the history of the European Union, and the Romanian government then decides to return part of that money to Microsoft with close to no tangible benefit for Romania."
http://www.edri.org/edri-gram/number7.11/open-source-microsoft-europe
