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."

Comments

This isn't that outrageous

[Brian Gordon]

If they look at the options and decide they still want Windows then let them buy Windows. The Windows platform does has a lot of advantages like a huge software library (especially well supported by commercial software), existing user familiarity, and the Office suite. If Red Hat isn't a good fit for their needs then where's the problem?

Re:This isn't that outrageous

[Registered Coward v2]

I think the problem here is that you didn't read up on the backstory which shows that they did not consider Red Hat or any company that wasn't Microsoft.

According to the article, it was a reissue of an existing contract; so not having a tender is not necessarily unusual. If the current vendor / supplier is performing satisfactorily then they are often kept in place since ripping everything out an starting new is likely to be more expensive and introduce a while new set of problems.

Is that right? It depends on the context and how the renewal was negotiated. From the article the Swiss government's actions do not appear unreasonable; and the response by the other vendors is the typical one from those that don't get a contract. Nothing new or exciting here, other than it involves open source which is a hot button here.

Talk about bad losers!

[filesiteguy]

I'm an OSS advocate. I use Ubuntu and openSUSE at home. My kids run Ubuntu.

However, if a decision was made to go with lesser closed-source software, than so be it. Move on.

Stunts such as this - bringing a lawsuit against the government - can only serve to harm the OSS movement.

Re:Talk about bad losers!

[robot_love]

No public tendering process was made. The contract was handed straight to Microsoft. Therefore your comment is irrelevant.

Re:Talk about bad losers!

[pembo13]

I'm an OSS advocate. I use Ubuntu and openSUSE at home. My kids run Ubuntu.

What was the point of that lead up?

Re:Talk about bad losers!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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?

Re:Talk about bad losers!

[internettoughguy]

Im a windows user currently, but it seems that a government not tendering its contract to the lowest bidder means it's swiss taxpayers who are the real losers here. It stinks of corruption, and its just not how you do business in the public sector.

Re:Talk about bad losers!

[techno-vampire]

"I'm an OSS advocate and I practice what I preach. However, I'm not a fanatic or a bigot. If Windows is best for the job, then use it."

At least, that's how I read it. Of course, it's also my own position. I use Linux and I try to get other people to try it. If they're happy with Windows, or they try Linux and it doesn't suit them, that's OK with me. After all, it's their computer, not mine.

They Did Not 'Look At The Options'

[MediaStreams]

Did you bother to read the actual articles? The issue is the fact that a single vendor was handed a contract without competing bids.

So, no, they didn't 'look at the options'.

Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options'

[Brian Gordon]

Yes I did. They decided that there would be no point to accepting bids because Microsoft was the only vendor who had a product that could meet their needs. They did look at the options, and they decided that Microsoft had no competitors who could meet their criteria.

Keep in mind that others do have different views than us and can make an informed decision without coming to the same conclusions...

Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options'

[s73v3r]

If they didn't open it up to a public bidding process, then they have no idea what possible solutions were out there that could fit their needs.

Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options'

[rastilin]

If they didn't open it up to a public bidding process, then they have no idea what possible solutions were out there that could fit their needs.

You're assuming the Government's IT department is completely ignorant of the world outside their doors; is it seriously plausible that they wouldn't know their options?"

Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options'

[dhavleak]

Well, it's not like the OSS guys are talking about options here.

Quote from TFA: "Open source supporters argue there has to be real political will for open source projects to succeed in the public sector."

That's political wrangling. Build a better product and the rest will follow. "Political will" is well, politics.

Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options'

[rolfwind]

They decided that there would be no point to accepting bids because Microsoft was the only vendor who had a product that could meet their needs. They did look at the options, and they decided that Microsoft had no competitors who could meet their criteria.

When your criteria becomes "Microsoft", it's hard to have other vendors, no? It's sort of like putting out the bid out for a new Toyota or chicken but with KFC's blend of 11 secret herbs and spices, and being astonished that only one or two companies can provide it.

That's why governments shoud always operate on open standards for file formats and the like, and that any programs specifically developed for them become OS. Even if they have to operate with propietary software for a time, it provides a roadmap and modularity to go with something else in the future.

Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options'

[arose]

They decided that there would be no point to accepting bids because Microsoft was the only vendor who had a product that could meet their needs.

Not surprising when you write the whole big basically describing Windows without mentioning the name, I've seen bids like that, they are written with the intention of not having to look at anything else.

Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options'

[sumdumass]

I don't think the correlation to that can be easily drawn. Of course the recommendations of the Government's IT departments would have in impact on the requirements but without an open bid, they do no know what is availible from who that could meet those requirements.

The open bid process is supposed to make sure that governments using public monies usually derived from taxes are not squandered, wasted, or used to benefit someone's outside interest. There is no assurance of this no matter how intelligent or unintelligent you believe the government IT departments to be without an open and public bidding process. You are inferring that their judgment is proper and it should play a role in the process but for all we know, the decision could be because someone wants to see their MS stock rise before they sell it. You are making a leap in claiming their competence and meeting criteria more so then the inference that they are ignorant of alternatives. You have no idea what the motivations are and at least with an open and public bidding process, they will have to justify their decisions with sound and verifiable facts. OF course this doesn't limit the benefit someone might see from a jump in stock prices or some kickback scheme hiding somewhere but it will how strong the justifications are that will both increase competition in the future as well as point to potential conflicts when the sole justification can be "we will have to educate out techs if we go with something else" or "i like the ribbon in MS office".

Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options'

[binkzz]

Build a better product and the rest will follow. "Political will" is well, politics.

If only that were true. Building a better product alone is not enough, certain companies will mix with politics and try to push the better product into the ground any way they can.

Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options'

[Marcos Eliziario]

You're assuming computing platforms are a commoditty. Here in Brasil, some government branches have the opposite policy. And I think it's fair. It's a strategical decision of buyers if they will stick to Open Source, Closed Source or if they will always consider both alternatives.

Open Source is as commercial as Closed Source. You have real money involved in it, it's just a different product offering.

It's funny that people insist on always bidding, when "smallest price" is some of the reasons most software consultancies have so shoddy practices as hiring the cheapest clowns on town and allocating them as programmers, which, by the way, leads to bad results, which in turn created the lucrative and useless industry of certifications, maturity models and so on.

Windows has it's problems, but it has it's strengths also, just like windows or Mac OS X. A large part of Linux development is funded by companies who are competing with microsoft or that perceived Microsoft overwhelming power on the Desktop Operating Systems and their entries on the server market as threat to some part of her business.

For the bad or the worse, Microsoft had some genuine innovations, being XMLHttpRequest one of the most recents. For the bad or the worse, Microsoft consolidated the market of PC computers enough to make them serious blow on IBM, which was a even worse dominant power.

And for the programmers here over 30 years old, well, I am pretty sure a healthy lot of them got their first jobs on programming on the them relatively cheap Wintel programming, which was cheap enough so small business could afford have their custom systems.

NT, although plagued by bad drivers and it's sheer complexity for programmers, has some good ideas on its kernel and the services provided by the OS. COM was a component model that spawned lots of childs (even bastard ones like EJB), being one of the mostable examples of it XPCOM on mozilla. Eliminating Microsoft all-together would be a loss for the market. Not that we should give'em free reign. But we should not put customers on judicial chains either. Linux doesn't need it to succeed. And I am not even sure if we really want a Linux only world, as much as I don't think a Windows only world.

I am for having checks on the power of powerful companies like Microsoft. But I think that we also want to put checks on Apple, IBM, Oracle and any other company powerful enough to impose themselves as the only alternative on some markets.

I find it utterly funny when people whose jobs depend on the content their companies serve over the internet feel happy with the virtual monopoly google has over search. I feel it funny, because google already has power enough to get money over the content YOU produce, just because they are the only viable way to customers get to YOUR site. I am all for having some kind of ongoing perpetual cold war between google, because while there is competition on that space, content providers will be able to get better deals with online advertising. If all your trafic comes from google, you're bond to accept whatever are their prices for running their adds. If your traffic comes from Google, Bing and whatever else in different proportions, you're in a way better position on negoating with them when it comes to how to share the pie.

People should stop seeing the world in terms of black and white and start seeing that corporations do what is best for their bottom line. Currently IBM supports Open Source, but because it leverages their services offering and offload the costs of having to do their own development of operating systems for all their machines, and it keeps them independent from Microsoft. It's all about business.

I am using linux since the times of the early red hat versions. As Linux gets more complicated and has more features, it also gets its share of problems. Every complex system will do, unless we devise a significant different way of programming, where we are able to prove our programs to be correct, instead of

Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options'

[s73v3r]

Actually, its been shown that the Pyramids were largely built by Egyptian farmers. They would plant their crops, go work on the pyramid for a while, then go back to harvest their crops.

Re:Wait, So The Slashdot Strategy Isn't Working?

[Toonol]

My plans are evidently working; I've already gotten to "everybody ignores me" stage. Two more steps to world domination!!!!

Problem is not in OSS. Problem is in law.

[DrYak]

However, if a decision was made to go with lesser closed-source software, than so be it. Move on.
Stunts such as this - bringing a lawsuit against the government - can only serve to harm the OSS movement

Well, the problem is that things shouldn't work that way in here Switzerland. The government can NOT just "make a decision". According to the law, our government should open a bid and then select ONE solution among SEVERAL offers*.

Instead, the government didn't follow the normal procedure. They just went directly to Microsoft. This is not the correct lawful procedure. They can't make a decision, they have select it among several offers. (Even if in the end Microsoft is the the one picked up, due for example to a larger available library of commercially supported software).

---

*: Some sectors (like the Swiss Army) are even required to always pick up at least TWO solutions from TWO different providers to avoid monopolies.
As an example, there was some unrest because both national Swiss army knife producer, Victorinox and Wenger merged (V bought W). And thus there's only 1 single monopoly left to provide one of the most widespread piece of cutlery in the Swiss army's equipment.
(Also back during the cold war when sourcing from a foreign producer, the army had always to find two neutral solutions : either one from either side of the curtain or from a neutral 3rd party. Never 2 from the same side, in order to keep balance and neutrality).

Merger gone bad?

[xaboo]

I thought it was reasonable to go with their own software, Isn't that why Microsoft purchased Switzerland in the first place?!

Re:Why Not the Direct Route?

[amorsen]

Because the lower court does a lot of work which the higher court just has to review. You don't start over from scratch.

Re:They are obliged to accept bids by EU rules

[init100]

This is required by EU rules

Switzerland is not a member of the EU.

Re:They are obliged to accept bids by EU rules

[KlaasVaak]

They are in the European Free Trade Association most EU rules apply to them and in exchange they get free movement of people in the EU, trade without restrictions with EU member states, etc. It makes them a virtual member of the EU just one without any influence.