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:And the Swiss sue back!

[Samalie]

Actually, the sad part is there is probably truth in the parent.

Somebody in the procurement department either

(a) Has a report from someone in their IT Department that erroneously states that they need won't work with Linux, and therefore has to be excluded from the procurement process.

or

(b) Has a report from someone in their IT Department that correctly states that they need won't work with Linux, and therefore has to be excluded from the procurement process.

Unfortunately, that's not a Microsoft Monopoly, in either case. If its (a) then their IT staff suck, not Microsoft's fault, and not making Microsoft a monopoly. If its (b) then Linux sucks for their needs, which again is not Microsoft's fault and does not make Microsoft a monopoly.

Make it work with Active Directory first, then sue

[melted]

Seriously, I've been running Linux as my primary OS for a while now, and my work laptop is joined to Active Directory at work through Likewise Open. Even so, the integration is rudimentary at best, and every piece of software has its own little tweaks and settings. Single sign-on is a PAIN on Linux. Group policies don't exist. Peripheral compatibility is spotty, particularly with scanners. Multi-factor auth is a pain in the ass. Remote desktop (VNC) is really slow compared to RDP which makes VPN-from-home scenario painful.

Those are a few MUST HAVE things that work in Windows out of the box. RedHat should hire a few more engineers and get them cracking on those, before spending a ton of money on lawyers.

I do think that they could have supplied quite a bit on the server side, though. File serving, web serving, document sharing, DB - those things don't need Windows anymore.

Building department

[Shag]

The word "building" in there makes me wonder whether this department might actually have some kind of legitimate need for CAD software or such, which tends to be under-represented on Linux (and Mac, for that matter).

Shop around, at Microsoft we won't be undersold!

[carlzum]

There's no use debating how much the agency would save with an MS-alternative. Influential organizations like large corporations, universities, and government agencies will always get substantial discounts on Windows and Office license agreements. MS knows these entities have enormous leverage over their vendors' and customers' software choices. IE-only web sites, VBA applications, and Word forms make alternative software less attractive or even impossible to use.

I work for a large corporation that produces a lot of documents and applications our customers and vendors need to work with. MS worked out the pricing so that any other OS or office suite was a much greater capital expense on the balance sheet. They were even nice enough to provide free professional services to help us develop "solutions" that invariably locked customers and vendors into MS products.