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Swiss Open Source Decision Going Microsoft's Way
hardsix writes "The recent legal wrangling between a group of open source supporters led by Red Hat against the Swiss government's decision to award an IT contract solely to Microsoft appears to be going Microsoft's way. A Swiss lawyer close to the case claims that a preliminary ruling has rejected the open source group's request to overturn the Microsoft contract however the case is still ongoing and there is still room for appeal. 'The Administrative Court hasn't made its final ruling yet but even if it finds in favor of Microsoft, there is still room for appeal. No matter what the ruling will be, an appeal will likely be filed to the Supreme Court, whose final word will have substantial significance in the future for public authorities with regards to computing services,' said Swiss legal firm BCCC AVOCATS. Open source supporters argue there has to be real political will for open source projects to succeed in the public sector."
Read the article. No public tendering process was made. The contract was handed straight to Microsoft. Therefore your comment is irrelevant.
.there is enough of everything for everyone.
Don't waste your time. The guy's a retard.
I'm an OSS advocate. I use Ubuntu and openSUSE at home. My kids run Ubuntu.
Really? You think you are an advocate?. More like user. If a large market segment decides to award a contact without even looking at OSS and you think it is fair, you are not much of an advocate. If a private company does that, we can leave it to the market to correct it. But the government is often the only provider of some services and all its vendors to be tied to a proprietary system where the vendor has to pay (Microsoft) to play is very very unfair. Further, being government, it is much less susceptible to market forces, with its ability to tax the population and pay the fees.
Ability to avail services of the government and to be a vendor to it without having to pay some third party fees is one of the fundamental rights of the people. How would you react if the government posts all the contract details in some private club with access restricted only to the members? Do you think it is fair?
Ahh so sad.. in 15 years this argument hasn't gotten past the nanny nanny boo boo stage.
MS is a monopoly, it finally has gotten reasonable competition. No business should get a rubber stamp for a deal.. I'm seeing a lot of this going the other way.. a wholesale move away from Microsoft products.. not because it's bad, but because of personal bias and unrealistic goals at the end of the rainbow for Free / Open Source.. Of course, Open Source free. and just because it's open source doesn't mean it's perfect.
The one thing the SCO lawsuit brought to light, was how do you keep a developer from bringing pieces of code from a proprietary solution into the light? (SCO lawsuit was a joke IMO)
under the logic of not having to pay some third party.. I guess the Government where you are runs all of the utlility companies, Facilities Maintenance suppiers etc. And of course they make their own squad cars for the police etc. There's always going to be 3rd parties.. the trick is to keep the costs down and quality up.. which requires a listing of requirements and an evaluation.
Obviously that wasn't done here, and was a mistake. But don't simply rule out a solution based on Technology Jihad.
Open source supporters argue there has to be real political will for open source projects to succeed in the public sector
In the article, it was one person who said that--an official of the Munich LiMux project. I can see why one might want to just attribute it to "open source supporters" rather than associating with that ongoing clusterfuck of a mismanaged Linux migration.
Good essay. I find it easier to simply say: several governments around the world have adopted Linux, there's no reason the Swiss government couldn't as well.
Oh, and also, STFU Microsoft shill. ^^
P.S., All governments should adopt open source policies, regardless of what software they choose exactly, and there is no question about that AT ALL. You don't have a zillion different branches of your government each pay $$$$$ for closed source software, that's just lame beyond belief. You instead pay money to developers to either make something, or improve upon existing software, if what you need doesn't exist yet, and you do that for a tiny fraction of the price.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.