Red Hat Challenges Swiss Government Over Microsoft Monopoly

An anonymous reader writes "'Linux vendor Red Hat, and 17 other vendors, have protested a Swiss government contract given to Microsoft without any public bidding. The move exposes a wider Microsoft monopoly that European governments accept, despite their lip service for open source, according to commentators. The Red Hat group has asked a Swiss federal court to overturn a three-year contract issued to Microsoft by the Swiss Federal Bureau for Building and Logistics, to provide Windows desktops and applications, with support and maintenance, for 14M Swiss francs (£8M; $15M) each year. The contract, for 'standardized workstations,' was issued with no public bidding process, Red Hat's legal team reports in a blog — because the Swiss agency asserted there was no sufficient alternative to Microsoft products.'"

Comments

Re:I play

[leamanc]

See, Stallman started the Free Software Foundation (GNU) 25 years or so ago. He's been promising an operating system, GNU Hurd, for a long time. The lack of a viable kernel has been keeping Hurd on the backburner ever since. But once the Linux kernel was released into the wild, all the other GNU tools, apps and utilities finally had an operating system with which they could be used. So nobody gives a crap about Hurd anymore (although it's apparently a 1.0 is still coming someday), and use Linux instead. But, Stallman is very quick to point out that it should be called GNU/Linux since most of the OS is made up of GNU tools, except for the Linux kernel itself. So the GP was just poking fun at Stallman's continual taking credit for Linux's success because of all of "his" GNU tools included in every distro.

Linux whiny CRYBABY

[fluffernutter]

Hey I'm the last guy to be touting Microsoft and I run Linux at home whenever I can, but face it Linux whiny crybabies.. Linux lost because it's very rough around the edges and it's a scary thing going into a piece of technology on a large scale when you are not 100% guaranteed it will work. When will you people understand that Microsoft continues to win again and again because as bad as it is, it supports all devices everywhere without question and with very little configuration and effort.
Linux must find a way to overcome this if they ever wish to become a major player. All I see are people saying 'we should have had a chance'. Well come to grips with the fact that life doesn't work that way! You need to prove you deserve a chance first!