Getting Swiss politicians to force the improvement of public procurement rules, is the last option open to a group of eighteen open source companies, according to representatives. The past two years, group in vain tried to get Switzerland's Federal Supreme Court to halt the awarding by the Department for Building and Logistics (BBL) of a major sofware contract that was open only to suppliers of licences of one single proprietary vendor.
On Tuesday, the Federal Supreme Court published its final ruling on the case. The court confirmed the earlier assessment by the Federal Administrative Court, that the procurement procedure does not harm the business interests of open source software service providers. The court added that enhancing market competion is up to the court.
In a statement, Ch/Open, a open source industry group closely involved in the case, said it regrets the verdict. "We will now use political means to level the playing field of public software procurement. The federal administration should not close its eyes to the general trend towards greater transparency and open systems."
According to Ch/Open, the court dismissed the argument that BBL had ignored possible alternatives to the software licences contract, worth 42 million Swiss francs (about 32.5 million Euro). "It left this out, because technical specifactions were missing from the procurement notice. This all is hard to believe, because the court itself uses alternatives, including the open source office suite OpenOffice."
Deplorable
Member of the Swiss National Council, Alec von Graffenried, dissaproved that the court 'approved the deplorable state of federal IT procurement'. He announced that in April he will submit proposals to improve procurement rules.
The council member is part of a Parliamentary working group focussing on Digital Sustainability. That group wants Swiss public administrations to make their IT systems independent from vendors.
BBL commented to the Swiss IT news site Inside IT: "The federal government's procurements will continue to measure the economic viability of its procurement. Competition between suppliers of technologies is not restricted, confirms the federal court. Particularly on the server already many open source products are used." BBL added it will continue to review open source alternatives case by case.