On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 22:31, Simon Schneebeli <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I just read that there was no agreement between the official Swiss > software buyers and open source organisations: > http://www.efd.admin.ch/00468/index.html?msg-id=30618&lang=fr > > I was a bit surprised to read that the government "Le service > d'adjudication a informé les recourants [...] qu'elle doit en > particulier garantir l'égalité de traitement de tous les soumissionnaires". > > Wow, so why did they not even consider open source solutions? Somehow I > have the impression that either me or someone else did not fully > understand what "égalité de traitement" means. Can anyone explain me?
You might have read about the complaint filed by several Swiss firms offering Free Software solutions because the legal rules were not respected on the federal level. The "égalité de traitement" argument is frankly bullshit IMHO, since they made a mistake in the first place and never ever did public submissions for license purchases as they should have. But the damage is done and they made the license purchase and now they try to limit the costs. Also, it's due to the rather complicated submission process the Swiss government uses, which scares away nearly all "PME/KMU" who do not actually have somebody dedicated to spot potential submissions, and then submit in the appropriate format, and in time. This is all very time (and money) intensive, so not that easy to realize for potential interesting firms. It is also to be noted that the official call for submissions have very often simply not been made as they should have, but the "Informatikdienste/Services Informatiques" relied on what they already had, without the slightest consideration that they might actually look elsewhere or respect the rules and make public submissions. There has been public focus recently on another case, since the city (or was it canton?) of Bern did decide on solutions without even bothering making a call for public submission. I think Theo Schmid has more insight in that particular case. Luckily there is now more public focus on how the tax money is spent since there is a parliamentary group who keeps their eyes open on such things. Also groups like ch/open, Wilhelm Tux and the FSFE (sorry for those I did not list, no wrong intended) try to raise awareness on the procedures. Keep in mind that keeping ones eyes on this and raise awareness is also quite some work and the more volunteers give a hand, the better this can be achieved :) Hope this answers your question, else you might want to have a look at the relevant pages on the following websites: http://www.digitale-nachhaltigkeit.ch/ http://www.ch-open.ch/sigs/osswhitepaper/osswhitepaper.pdf I certainly forgot half of the information here, but I am a bit in a hurry here and I think both Mathias Stürmer and Theo Schmid will be delighted to give you more details :) Regards, Myriam. -- Protect your freedom and join the Fellowship of FSFE: http://www.fsfe.org Please don't send me proprietary file formats, use ISO standard ODF instead (ISO/IEC 26300) -- Ubuntu-ch mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-ch
