Estradas de Portugal, the country's road authority, is cancelling its request for licences of proprietary software worth 950,000 euro, following a protest by ESOP, an association of Portuguese open source service providers. "We will launch a new, corrected call for tender soon", a spokesperson for the public administration confirmed this morning.
The road works authority published its call for proprietary software licences in late May. This week Tuesday, ESOP announced that it would legally protest the call. The organisation explained that the procedure clearly disrespects the procurement rules, which prohibit requesting specific brands or products. In February, ESOP won a similar court case, protesting a call for tender launched by the administration of the city of Almeida.
A spokesperson for Estradas de Portugal this morning said the state owned-company is cancelling the call, confirming the suggestion made in a report published by the Portuguese IT news site Computerworld, yesterday. The IT site wrote the company had appeared to have given up the call for tender. Instead of calling for new licences, the firm said, it was looking for renewed support.
Commercial open source
Computerworld quotes the company saying that "is a well-known case of successful use of open source technologies." Estradas de Portugal told the IT site that to manage toll revenues, it is using Pentaho and Jbilling. These tools, for business intelligence and, respectively, for billing are available under either a commercial or an open source community licence. The company's customer relationship management is done using SugarCRM, similarly available under commercial and open source licence conditions. The road works company is also using the open source ERP suite OpenERP, for project and asset management.
More information:
ESOP press release (in Portuguese)
Computerworld news item (in Portuguese)
Computerworld news item (in Portuguese)