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."

Comments

Well of course there were no serious alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux just isn't ready for the desktop yet. It may be ready for the web servers that you nerds use to distribute your TRON fanzines and personal Dungeons and Dragons web-sights across the world wide web, but the average computer user isn't going to spend months learning how to use a CLI and then hours compiling packages so that they can get a workable graphic interface to check their mail with, especially not when they already have a Windows machine that does its job perfectly well and is backed by a major corporation, as opposed to Linux which is only supported by a few unemployed nerds living in their mother's basement somewhere. The last thing I want is a level 5 dwarf (haha) providing me my OS.

Re:no serious alternatives

[Hadlock]

The IT we have are under staffed and over extended. There is a cost to retraining people to new products. There is a cost to replacing an existing product with something new. There is a cost to the amount of new help IT would have to provide. While you transition from one product to another, you have to support and know both. In most of these examples the product may be free but the time to do it has a huge price. More so when it currently works, users already know it, and you have bigger issues to deal with.

This is pretty much what I'm guessing the IT admin determined, and although he didn't document it, is what his decision was based off of. If you're a 10, 20 or maybe even 50 man shop, you can probably transition on 60 days if you're truly determined. Supporting both for 12 months is just not worth the logistics unless your boss' boss tells you open source is the only way to go. There's just too much else to do, so you sign the Microsoft software contract, which was already budgeted for, and move on. Because 100% open source apps aren't directly drop in replacements yet. Or at least I wouldn't risk my job over it. The fact that this was sensationalized is just another slow media day and I think the Linux Zealots should cut this guy some slack.

For as much as I would love to make the jump, I have nothing driving me to do it and only resistance preventing me from doing it.

Yup.