Swiss Open Source Decision Going Microsoft's Way 105
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."
Re:Talk about bad losers! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm an OSS advocate. I use Ubuntu and openSUSE at home. My kids run Ubuntu.
What was the point of that lead up?
Problem is not in OSS. Problem is in law. (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
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*: 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).
Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options' (Score:3, Interesting)
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 are obliged to accept bids by EU rules (Score:4, Interesting)
This is required by EU rules
Switzerland is not a member of the EU.
Re:They Did Not 'Look At The Options' (Score:3, Interesting)
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' (Score:3, Interesting)