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

Switzerland not in EU

[RiotingPacifist]

For anybody interested how this interacts with all the pro linux movements from the EU recently, well its completely orthogonal Switzerland is not a member of the EU.

Btw i believe the issue here is the lack of bidding process not that the contract went to Microsoft, like if all the contracts for costly wars in the midle east were given to a particular company without offering them up to any of the competition, good thing shit like that doesn't happen...oooh!

Re:Swiss

[HappySmileMan]

Nowhere did the summary say EU.
European != EU.

Re:And the Swiss sue back!

[Z00L00K]

Just be aware that Switzerland is NOT an EU member, so only Swiss laws does apply.

Re:Swiss

[carlzum]

Yes...

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 14 million Swiss Franc (£8 million) each year.

Switzerland is a federationm Direct Democracy

[omb]

Like the USA, Switzerland is a federation, much smaller, but beautifully formed. The Kantons (18?) are the main source of power, not the federal government. And Direct Democracy means that the equivalent of Presedential signing is a referendum on legislation AFTER is is passed by the Bundesrat. Actually the referendum is negative, ie it vetos what the pols passed.

This is _why_ Switzerland is not in the EU, last time the pols tried it was thrown out by a 87% majority and that was the second asking so it wont come back for 30 years. Switzerland is in EFTA and has a bilateral treaty with the EU and is implementing the Shengen accord. Less strict frontier controls. If a question is decided at referendum it can normally be asked once again, but if voted down it is rude, and pointless to bring it back so pols cant saw, or piggy back the way they can in the US.

Many parts of Switzerland do use open source, The City of Zurich (Stadt Zürich) uses it extensively, as does Academia. Kanton Zürich provides tax preparation software free for Linux, Mac & M$Win.

Re:Switzerland is a federationm Direct Democracy

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for the canton of Zürich, and I can tell you that getting a piece of OSS into the system is almost always a renegade act by a single sysadmin. In no way are we using OSS extensively. If you want to look at extensive OSS use, look at the canton of Solothurn, which has replaced all Windows-PCs and servers in public administration with ones running Linux.

Zürich has a policy that states that OSS should be _considered_ on each round of software evaluations, but may only be used it it presents "no additional burden" to the user. Of course all of the senior admins, those who are in power, will find reasons to use their favorite Windows-based piece of software thanks to that clause. Anything else would simply be "an inconvenience to the user", and that's how you shoot down any attempt to introduce OSS.

I work in a part of gov't that is reasonably independent, but even we were forced by cantonal politics to replace our (perfectly working) Postfix + Courier installation with a (very buggy) Microsoft Exchange solution that takes THREE TIMES as much hardware to run. And I don't know how much more personnel is necessary, adding a fixed slice to our running costs.

Or do you have a list of where and what OSS is used in the canton? Would be interesting to see, as I've been trying to network with the responsible people for years, and all I get is screams of impotent rage from those who'd like to implement OSS and smug grins from those who oppose it.

(Slashdot: Fix character encoding? My umlauts all died :( )

Re:Switzerland is a federationm Direct Democracy

[Kirth]

Not quite..

Yes it is a direct democracy. This means we have two powers, apart from choosing our representatives:
- The power to take up a referendum against a proposed law. This takes some 50'000 people to sign a paper saying so. If this suceeds, there will be a ballot where every citizen (from the age of 18 upwards) may vote for or against it.
- The power to propose laws. This takes 100'000 people to back it. If that suceeds, there will again be a ballot.

The 26 cantons are not the main power. They have a lot to say in their respective area, like infrastructure or taxes, but they haven't too much to say when it comes to laws. Still, it's possible that one canton outlaws smoking in restaurants, where the others don't -- but it's just about impossible for a canton to lift the federal prohibition on drugs.

The voters from each canton send 2 representative to the "Ständerat", some kind like the US Senate (Upper House); and some more representatives, according to the population, to the Nationalrat (House of Commons). Both of these Houses need to ratify any proposed law. The Bundesrat (7 people) is the executive and is not directly chosen by the people, but by the Nationalrat and the Ständerat.

Anyway. This has just about nothing to do with the problem at hand. Which is that contrary to the rules, the Bundesverwaltung (administration; bureaucrats essentially) has given contracts to Microsoft without opening them for bids.

Re:Maybe the Swiss just know what they want?

[cbiltcliffe]

... could someone like RH claim that they could provide a solution that'd be 100%-compatible with the existing MS environment at a lower cost? I seriously doubt this would be the case.

Microsoft can't truthfully claim this, either. They certainly can't claim a lower cost than MS, but they can't even claim 100% compatibility, either.
That doesn't stop them from making the claim, though...

Re:Maybe the Swiss just know what they want?

[init100]

it makes sense they'd go directly to MS rather than go through a public bidding process when they want to upgrade.

Many countries have laws that require a public bidding process when any governmental organization procures some good or service. You can't just ignore that when planning to make a large procurement, because that means that tax funds could be spent on a suboptimal solution.

Of course, that may happen anyway, but a public bidding process lowers that risk somewhat.

That's odd

[Kludge]

When I installed Linux my Canon scanner just worked.

When I installed Windows, it told me I needed to install a driver. What does that mean?

Re:And the Swiss sue back!

[Daengbo]

Exactly. Switzerland states that only MS will do, but how can you truly know what's available without a public bid?

Re:And the Swiss sue back!

[value_added]

The Swiss like their operating systems like their cheese -- Plenty of holes.

I know you're trying to be funny, but I'll put on my pedantic hat and remind everyone that Switzerland makes lots of cheeses, few of which contain holes.

What you're thinking of is that yellowish waxy product made in Wisconsin or California that vaguely resembles emmenthaler. By contrast, appenzeller and gruyere, for example, are similarly popular, and have no holes.

So much for your holey theory. ;-)

To make things more complicated

[DrYak]

Just be aware that Switzerland is NOT an EU member

But we did democratically vote and sign several bilateral treaties.

RedHat challenges to see if they could use the implications of some of those treaties and ask for a public bid.