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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.'"
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!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Nowhere did the summary say EU.
European != EU.
OMG we should come with a version of Linux Monopoly! Instead of going to jail, you get fined for violating the GPL, and it instead of collecting $200 when passing Go, you can instead up the rev number of your sourceforge-hosted project up one notch.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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.
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Just be aware that Switzerland is NOT an EU member, so only Swiss laws does apply.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Don't sue your potential customers. It's not a good way to improve your public relations.
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.
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.
The Swiss like their operating systems like their cheese -- Plenty of holes.
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.
Which is why Switzerland is being sued, not Microsoft. The summary is actually somewhat erroneous here, because this has little to do with Microsoft or its monopoly, they just happen to be the bidder here.
Most government departments have mandatory open bidding processes for procurement of everything from software to roads. If they had, in violation of these rules, given a no-bid contract to Red Hat, Microsoft could've sued the Swiss government on the exact same grounds and forced them to use a competitive bidding process. If the same process occurred in roadbuilding, and they gave a no-bid to Contractor A when Contractor B also wanted a shot to bid, Contractor B can sue. So it's true that Microsoft isn't really in the wrong here, a Swiss government agency is.
That being said, however, as to your "a" and "b" scenarios, it really doesn't matter. The way the bidding process works is that they present a set of requirements as to what the product being procured must do. Anyone who is willing to fill those requirements (either by using what they've already got or developing something new to fill them) may bid. In your "b" scenario, they would have to know not only that "Red Hat's software is currently incapable of doing something we need", but also that "Red Hat is unwilling or unable to develop that functionality." Apparently, that's not the case, since it seems Red Hat certainly does want a stab at it.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
... 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...
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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.
It's bad either way. Even if it is true that they have something that genuinely can only be made to work with Windows as of today (and they genuinely cannot meet said Windows requirement in any way other than having Windows on all desktops), they should still open the bidding process and allow Linux vendors to quote them a price that includes fixing the problem in Linux.
It might still work out cheaper than going with Windows, and if it doesn't, then they can still go with Windows, secure in the knowledge that there has been a fair and open bidding process to justify their decision.
As for the monopoly argument, I don't see a problem with the term. If the Swiss government is automatically granting business to Microsoft without allowing any competitors to bid, then the Swiss government is indeed effectively granting Microsoft a monopoly. The market in question is a fairly small one, and the existence of the monopoly is the fault of the Swiss government rather than of Microsoft, but it appears to exist nonetheless.
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.
the Linux Kernel itself replaces Boardwalk, because it's the most important piece of software in a Linux distro
Somewhere in a basement beneath MIT, Richard Stallman just peed his pants in exasperated fury.
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For 10 million (or more) dollars, I'm pretty sure Red Hat could make whatever they need to work work. The biggest advantage Linux has is enterprise installations that are large enough to absorb programmer salaries into the budget, and thus can customize the entire installation for a one time cost.
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Microsoft Works Tirelessly to make sure you have little glitches, by breaking every Open Standards it can get its grubby hands on, if you want examples look no further than the Kerberos extensions which they tried to NDA until MIT's lawyers pointed out that the extension was a derivative of copyright work and the laughable Excel ODF formula screw up.
They dont want to interoperate but will be forced to do so.
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?
Exactly. Switzerland states that only MS will do, but how can you truly know what's available without a public bid?
Put identity in the browser.
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. ;-)