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Swiss Court Halts Non-Competitive Contract With Microsoft
Ade writes "Looks like the challenge to the Swiss Administrative Court concerning the government contract given to Microsoft without any public bidding was successful: The court has issued a temporary injunction (note: article in German) against the Federal Office of Buildings and Logistics (BBL), effectively stopping the CHF 14M (£8M; $15M)-contract to deliver licenses and support for software used on government computers for the next three years. According to Swiss Government practices, any contract over CHF 50'000 has to undergo a public call for offers. The BBL cited 'no serious alternatives' as the reason which this contract never did."
Why don't you just leave Microsoft alone, after everything it's been through!
If your requirement is to be able to run Windows software, then there may in fact be "no serious alternatives". Now, clearly they should step back and look at the bigger picture.
Having done work for the State of NY, I am sure this happens else where.
Fair and Competitive bidding work like this...
You need a job to be done.
You call the guys who you want to do it.
They do some "Free" analysis of the problem.
They give you the requirements as they would do it.
They also attach the Resume of the people who they want to do the work.
They make the bids to match the requirements and fit the resume of the people.
They take in all the bid.
Then they find the winning bid (which isn't the cheapest) but is a perfect match to the requirements. (which happens to be the company that did the free analysis)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...but it's close enough for government work!
*ducks*
*runs*
The Swiss Franc has been consistently weaker than the dollar. Right now Google says CHF 14M = USD 12.9M.
too slow today slimshady
NO SIG
"no serious alternatives" is purchase order speak for "too lazy to look, what we have works" or "renewing contract the easy way". Many times its easier to continue with the software you have, rather than force a regime change, especially when the Microsoft Software is already factored into the annual budget. It's hard to blame them in this case.
moox. for a new generation.
''Applications'' is horribly vague.
Part of the problem with this sort of thing is that the people who write the specifications tend to think in terms of solutions, thus ''Word Processing'' is ''MS Word''. These people need to think in terms of what they are trying to achieve and to draft the specifications in those terms. This will allow different/innovative tenders.
I wonder what the outcome of this will be. Lets see, they have the money approved, they want an "install it, and if there's a problem, it should be fixed by the manufacturer" approach, they want compatibility with standard file formats used throughout the business and government world except for technical/scientific/HPC based workplaces...
Does anyone knows how the Swiss law handles a wrongly done bidding? In the Netherlands and probably the rest of the EU, when a bidding was done against the law, the company that won the bidding may not enter the new bidding. At my old university they had this situation with the coffee machines, there was only one company that had a machine that produced decent coffee and so they won the contract. However a mistake was made in the bidding (the bidding was nationally, instead of European, contracts worth more then a ceratin amount get a European bidding procedure) and the bidding had to be done again, however the only company that could produce decent coffee was excluded and the university got stuck with terrible coffee machines.
Sounds like somebody tried to use Gentoo.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
What are they implying here? Linux is funny? Are they calling us comedians?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Way to think inside the box.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Exactly correct.
This, on the other hand, is nonsense.
If you want to get from A to B, even if you have a requirement to do so by car (which is reasonable), why the hell would you care if the car runs on gas or diesel? Are you allergic to diesel fumes or something? It's a fucking car. Get over yourself.
And we're talking about brands here. Specifying Microsoft software is the equivalent of demanding a Ford car. If the requirement is to sum up tables of figures, you need a spreadsheet; you do not necessarily need Microsoft Excel.
But then, I knew you were talking nonsense when you started hating on Vista. If you're so blinkered and set in your ways that you can't even cope with Vista, which is actually a perfectly good operating system, then there's no way you're competent to talk about IT in any way, shape, or form. Please do the world a favor and find yourself a job that doesn't involve making decisions about computers.
Even if the requirement is to run Windows software, there may be alternatives. How will they know if they don't put it up for bid? (E.g, someone might bid a system based on Linux and Wine. That may or may not actually do the job, depending on the specific software and how much work the bidder is willing to put in to tweak things.)
Presumably that's what the BBL meant by 'no serious alternatives' and sadly they are right. In my experience Wine in any of it's manifestations is highly unlikely to provide the kind of stability they would get with MS software for all kinds of high availability enterprise software. This whole mess just underlines:
Normally I'm not in favor of forcing the hand of companies like this but Microsoft's strangle hold is really harmful, competition killing and generally wrong. I'd like to know how many people would stand up and cheer if Ford had a 90% market share on the automobile markets and somebody stood up and claimed like the MS fanboys do: "O.K. so it's a monopoly but that has all sorts of advantages like: no matter what car you get in everything is so familiar, no matter where you are in the world never a problem with spares ... blah, blah ... long list ... and besides who needs cars in colors other than black?"
I don't usually feed the trolls, but I'm feeling generous today.
1. Many servers run on Linux, and have done so for a decade.
2. Every Linux distro I've installed since 2000 has installed using a GUI, and then booted into a GUI, and needed no compilation or tricks to get to my mail. I just clicked on the Thunderbird icon, entered my POP information and mail was flowing.
3. Linux is supported by major corporations. Unless you consider IBM to be some type of small-fry company.
4. Races don't have levels, professions have levels. Thus there is no such thing as a "level 5 dwarf". But there is such thing as a "level one slashdot troll"
Oh, and you are showing your age there gramps... not many people under 30 have even heard of Tron, let alone know what the word "fanzine" means. Oh, and it's not referred to as the "world wide web" anymore, people just call it the internet or the web.
One final word... this story is about a government contract. Governments networks are run by industry professionals, not "average users" and even if they end up with Windows, the admins will almost certainly know plenty about how to use Unix and Linux, as well as other OS's.
And what do you mean writing with protocols? What protocol evens covers the general operating systems of a computer?
POSIX. Win32.
Specifying a brand of product that fits those needs is no more idiotic than asking for a car that runs gas instead of diesel when, by your view, the req should have said "gets me from point A to point B" (had to throw an obligatory auto analogy in there, sorry).
Then the spec is really "gets me to from point A to point B while minimizing fuel cost", and bidding takes fuel cost into account. Diesel vehicles get more MPG than gasoline vehicles, and right now, the price of diesel vs. gas in the USA tips the scale in favor of diesel
Specifying Microsoft software is the equivalent of demanding a Ford car. If the requirement is to sum up tables of figures, you need a spreadsheet; you do not necessarily need Microsoft Excel.
So what happens if the requirement is "interoperate with the database of the existing accounting and order management package that we use, which was written as a set of VBA scripts that run on top of Microsoft Access 2007"?
IMHO, not being able to run VBA is a feature, not a liablilty.
Unless your existing business operation software is a commercial off-the-shelf product written in VBA. Then the requirement becomes something like "run Stone Edge Order Manager Enterprise Edition", and the only thing I've seen do that is Windows + Microsoft Office Access + SQL Server Express.
You lost me. Maybe if you put together a PowerPoint I would be able to follow your complex logic. ;)
Basic Dungeons and Dragons did have advancement within race for non humans so you could have a level 5 dwarf or elf (but not human). That changed within Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
Our proprietary accounting software was built from the get go on open source OSes (starting with IBM EDX - obscure, but open source - though not in the GPL sense). Originally written for a green screen environment, it was abandoned for prettier Windows bases systems by a few clients. All the companies that left functional for pretty either went under or came back. We now have a pretty web front end, and a growing number of EDI, Web Service, and Java interfaces to integrate with other software - even Windows software integrates via SOAP (when there is source available for a Windows programmer to customize).
As far as highly functional open source enterprise accounting software goes, have you looked at Adempiere? I have been playing with it, and it is good enough that my long term goal is to migrate our stuff to its framework.
In the original D&D (as opposed to AD&D), dwarves were a class; i.e. all dwarves were basically fighters with racial abilities and modifiers and a d8 (?) instead of a d10 for HP. I think maybe they got some limited hide-in-(cave)-shadows ability or something too. I don't remember.
Hey, pedantry and trolling go together like a PC and a 10' pole.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
The problem is, my accounting software is propriatary and does not run on Linux - Windows Only (and I've tried WINE, no dice on this one).
Your problem is bigger than "open source vs. proprietary" I'm afraid.
It should matter whether the accounting software is proprietary or not, because the data itself ought to be in as flat an plain of a file as possible. Encrypted, perhaps, and even compressed (a la open document), but the actual data should be in a plain format like human-readable ascii, or easily parsed binary, where the file header holds a description of the format in human readable form.
You're talking about ever-important financial data. Its storage ought to be even more robust than mere solar data or ice-core sample data.
Open source might give you that, and it might even be the easiest route to that, but if you're stuck with a proprietary format you don't know how to read yourself, how do you know it's not going to screw up (or worse, screw up silently) on the first errant bit-flip?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
You write that as your requirement, and you get the MS-based system.
Before the next upgrade cycle though, you probably ought to do something about getting your balls out of that vice, even if you're going to decide to go with MS then as well. You don't exactly have a very strong negotiating position now, do you.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It might just be the person who decides there are no viable option other then windows needs to be replaced
with a more up to date (technology wise) person with aptitude for the tech department!!!
Is there a -1 Woosh! mod?