Public administrations should give a fair chance to open source when procuring IT solutions, says the OSB Alliance, a trade group for some ninety German, Swiss and Austrian open source ICT service providers. "All other things being equal, open source software should be preferred because of its benefits." The trade group is disseminating a manual to help public administrations tweak their procurement requests - to take into account free and open source solutions.
The guideline is meant to be useful to both the procuring agencies and the solution providers. The documents explains where the usual contract clauses become incompatible with free and open source software, and offers concrete workarounds and replacement texts. The text covers the five so-called EVB-IT templates that Germany's public administration are obliged to use for drafting IT procurement contracts and dealing with development, architecture, maintenance, services and provisioning.
According to the OSB Alliance, public administrations are still struggling to level the playing field for free and open source solutions. They recognise the software's 'considerable advantages in terms of cost and flexibility' and see how it allows them to keep control over their information, the trade group writes. "But exactly this is posing new challenges to public administrations, for they also want guarantees, maintenance and reliable support."
Fine print
The document checks all the relevant paragraphs of the EVB-IT templates. It signals potential problems between, for example, default statutory limitations in the case of software development and clauses in the GPL, the most-used free software licence, that rule out such restrictions. In the case of procuring IT services, the guideline presents forms that can be used by procurement officials to signal that their request includes those based on free software.
The text also helps public administrations what to do with enhancements that they develop, or bugs that they fix. Here the document draws for instance on texts used by the German city of Munich, instructing its contractors to communicate this correctly to the software developers 'upstream'.
Minutiae
The guidelines were written by Till Jaeger, a lawyer specialised in legal issues concerning open source software. The document was handed out at the Cebit ICT trade fair in Hannover, last week. The OSB Alliance is also making it available on the trade group's website.
Similarly, one year ago, the European Commission's ISA programme (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations) published six standard 'contract clauses', useful to public administrations that want to make sure that IT solutions they are procuring can be shared and re-used.
More information:
Guide for open source in government (pdf, in German)
OSB Alliance press announcement (in German)
Linux Magazine news item (in German)
Joinup news item