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

Re:But they may (sadly) have been right

[AJWM]

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.)

But yeah, the requirements ought to be based on functionality, not a specific software package.

Re:But they may (sadly) have been right

[MoldySpore]

It is ALWAYS the non-technical bureaucrats making the purchasing decisions, since they have the money. But it is the job of the IT/Computer Techs/Nerds under their command to show them the alternatives and, clearly, state why X is better than Y.

Sure, sometimes that non-technical bureaucrat will still go with an option that most tech-savvy people wouldn't (such as going open source), more times than not "free" + "works almost the same" is enough to get the higher-ups on board. Although the cost of retraining an entire user-base of employees on how to use Linux effectively is a much bigger step than switching from, say, MS Office to OpenOffice.

Case and point, I did contract work for a company that had switched completely over to OpenOffice, and saved themselves a CRAP load of $, which is significant in this troubled economy. I'd be surprised if more companies didn't start doing this, especially if the economy stays in the crapper like it has been. But that same company still runs Windows XP/2000 because the cost of retraining people would outweigh the short-term turnaround. Illogical, but in these tough times it is hard to blame moves like that.