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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*
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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