Summary: Switzerland exposes signs of Microsoft mischief and the same goes for the London Olympics (2012)

IN previous debates about illegal procurement we showed that Microsoft had been violating the law in many places where its products were chosen without even giving any consideration to competitors. To present the most recent examples, see the story of Spain, Portugal [1, 2], in Catalonia, Turkey, Russia, and Thailand. According to the following, Switzerland may be no exception:

The Swiss federal government published in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce that it has granted a maintenance contract over CHF 42 million to Microsoft — however, without a prior tender. The monopolist apparently had been granted the contract under exclusion of any potential competition.

The Federal Office of Construction and Logistics (BBL) apparently signed the maintenance contract over Windows and Office licenses, SharePoint et cetera in February already. A tender had never been held, so competitors had never been given a chance to demonstrate their own products. This, however, is clearly against the official regulations for acquisition of resources. A speaker of the Open Source corporation group /ch/open announced that the decision would be contested in front of the Federal Court which, incidentally, is a known user of the OpenOffice.org suite.

Who could ever forget the OOXML fiasco in Switzerland?

Over here in the UK, there seems to be another Richard Steel/Newham-like scam (see background here). The Free software-hostile CIO this time around is Gerry Pennell, who spouts utter lies to justify what could be gentle collusion. From Blankenhorn:

CIO Gerry Pennell (right) gave a lot of blah-blah-blah to the Green IT conference in London, but this really has nothing to do with energy efficiency or application compatibility. (Picture from the GreenIT Web site.)

Green IT? Environment? What on Earth [pun unintended] does that even mean for visibility/modifiablility of source code?? Glyn Moody has more to say on the subject:

Somebody clearly doesn't understand open source:

Despite a mission to make the games as financially and environmentally sustainable as possible, the organisers of London 2012 have ruled out any significant use of open source software.

Open source is the *only* sustainable option for software, because it can be re-used - one of the great advantages of free software. So given that open source should be the only option, why aren't the organisers using it?

[...]

What planet is this man living on? "Proven software...does not run on open standards"? What, like Apache, or Sendmail or BIND or JBoss or MySQL? Well, it's clear which Olympics event *he* would come first in: clueless CIO twit of the year.

The smell of corruption aside, this gentleman seems to be begging for another angry blue screen of death, just like in the Beijing Olympics. ⬆