Is Freedom excluded because of illegal activity?

THE issue of procurement is one that we touched on before. This issue has become hot again because of the following articles from the past couple of weeks:

• Procurement and Open Source Software (2008) - draft version
• European Commission publishes guidelines on the procurement of FOSS
• Public Procurement and FOSS
• Many software tenders in EU maybe 'illegal'
• Hidden cost of proprietary standards may lead to illegal tenders

We wish to draw attention to the following disgusting incident.

Council does not want to provide its contract with Microsoft, destroys study on Open Source

Marco Cappato MEP asked the Council to provide him the contract concluded by the Council and Microsoft, and the Study on the Open Source realized by the interinstitutional committee on informatics in 2005. The Council refused to supply these documents.

It true, this would not be the first time that Microsoft relies on illegal contracts [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] or a case where its cronies interfere with, shaft, or manipulate studies on Free/open source software [1, 2, 3, 4]. This has got to stop. ⬆

Related reading (external):

• Quebec government sued for buying Microsoft software
• The Tragedy of the Anti-Commons
• Interview with NOiV's Maarten Wijnen-Meijer on Study on Gov't Acquisition of OS Software - Pick Your Brains
• NL: Use of Open Source software requires no European IT tenders
• Lawmaker blasts U.K. government on Microsoft policy
• UK Government: Closed Minds on Open Source
• The UK has wasted over $4 billion on failed IT projects since 2000
• Feds revise IT procurement model
• Governments slammed for anti-competitive software tendering practices