In The Euro Election, Vote For Free Software!

We got a strong and positive reaction to our story about Red Hat’s challenge, to a contract Switzerland gave to Microsoft, for £8 million a year, without any open bidding, based on the statement that there is “no sufficient alternative” to Microsoft on the desktop.

That statement, by Switzerland’s Federal Bureau of Building and Logistics, is on the face of it, blatantly untrue. There are plenty of people who find Linux-based systems are a sufficient alternative, including workers at other Swiss government departments.

The defence of the contract – if any, we haven’t had any official statement from Microsoft or the Swiss Government – would probably be that the systems must provide compatibility with existing desktop applications, and data files.

Which is not the most convincing defence. Accessing older Microsoft-based files from Linux desktops is a generic problem which any open source systems house deals with on a daily basis. Any procurement authority who let this through as a reason for not opening a deal to tender, should be given some serious questioning about the level of understanding of IT.

As one respondent to our article put it. “For £8 million a year, Red Hat could probably deliver compatibility to pretty much anything.”

Other respondents made it clear (in case our article was ambiguous) that the case is not about monopoly as such (we used that as shorthand in our headline) and that Switzerland is not part of the EU. It’s got bilateral treaties that link it in pretty strongly, but it’s not subject to any European procurement rules. That doesn’t make it right not to open a government tender though.

Despite this, open source advocates say this sort of tendering is widespread. Contracts which can only be met by Microsoft take one of three forms:

1. Issue a contract straight to Microsoft without bothering to tender (as happened in Switzerland)
2. Issue a tender document, but one which specifies Microsoft products by name
3. Issue a tender document which requires tight integration with Microsoft products that you already have – so, as activists put it to us, “only Microsoft products need apply”

All of these approaches seem dubious to us. Do they meet government requirements to tender openly and get the best value? And even if they are justifiable under those requirements, can they be justified as getting the best value for public money?

Microsoft is proud of its role at the centre of IT, and has fostered an assumption that all too many people make, at all too many levels, that there is “no real alternative”.

The interesting thing is that this story seems to be breaking just as European citizens have a chance to express opinions about it. Europe’s people are about to vote in the elections to the European Parliament, and the Fee Software movement has issued a challenge for candidates to declare their support for free software – and for voters to cast their decision accordingly.

There are fears that UK citizens may vote negatively, in protest at the activities of members of the local Westminster Parliament. We’d like to see a more constructive approach – voting for more important regional issues, such as this one.