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."

Re:But they may (sadly) have been right

[AJWM]

Even if the requirement is to run Windows software, there may be alternatives. How will they know if they don't put it up for bid? (E.g, someone might bid a system based on Linux and Wine. That may or may not actually do the job, depending on the specific software and how much work the bidder is willing to put in to tweak things.)

But yeah, the requirements ought to be based on functionality, not a specific software package.

Re:Probably Saved a lot of money

[macbeth66]

HEH

That reminds me of my early days of obtaining desktops, circa 1986. Anything over $500 had to go for bid, so we got bids on the parts. They assembled it for 'free'. That worked for close to two years.

Re:But they may (sadly) have been right

[MoldySpore]

It is ALWAYS the non-technical bureaucrats making the purchasing decisions, since they have the money. But it is the job of the IT/Computer Techs/Nerds under their command to show them the alternatives and, clearly, state why X is better than Y.

Sure, sometimes that non-technical bureaucrat will still go with an option that most tech-savvy people wouldn't (such as going open source), more times than not "free" + "works almost the same" is enough to get the higher-ups on board. Although the cost of retraining an entire user-base of employees on how to use Linux effectively is a much bigger step than switching from, say, MS Office to OpenOffice.

Case and point, I did contract work for a company that had switched completely over to OpenOffice, and saved themselves a CRAP load of $, which is significant in this troubled economy. I'd be surprised if more companies didn't start doing this, especially if the economy stays in the crapper like it has been. But that same company still runs Windows XP/2000 because the cost of retraining people would outweigh the short-term turnaround. Illogical, but in these tough times it is hard to blame moves like that.

What are the consequences of this?

[Ghost Hedgehog]

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.

Re:Probably Saved a lot of money

[Anonymous Coward]

I just happened to go through "Government contracts" training nd what you describe is illegal, punishable by up to 5 years in prison for the official giving the info to would be contractors and whoever got the info + up to 50.000 in fines from persons and up to 500.000 from the corporation that improperly obtained such contract + damages and stuff.

The rule is if you write specs, you cannot bid.
If you leak exact specs or bid details to participating bidders you get fined and go to jail.
(there are total of 5 rules or so).

It cuts both ways

[CustomDesigned]

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.