CH: Politicians push for open source centre for Swiss administrations
A group of Swiss politicians wants the government to start an open source resource centre, which should assist public administrations moving to open source and open standards.
The group of politicians call themselves 'Group Digital Sustainability' and represent the Socialist Party, the Evangelical Peoples Party, the Free Democratic Party and the Green Liberal Party. The group has put forward seven proposals to increase the county's use of open source.
Next to proposing an open source competence centre like the ones in the Netherlands and Germany, GPL member Thomas Weibel proposes to make the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF) the default document standard in all Swiss municipalities. Weibel also wants to make public the list of all formats that are currently in use. He says governments should explain when they use proprietary formats and that they should be assisted to move to open standards.
Next on the wish list is an inventory of how much Swiss public administrations are using open source software. This report should also make an estimate of the financial savings that could be realised by moving to this type of software.
The Swiss government in the past three years has failed to publish tenders for ninety IT contracts worth more than 250,000 CHF - about 170,000 euro, the minimum amount at which a Swiss public administration must issue a call for tender. The government admitted this in answer to questions by national councillor Edith Graf-Litscher (SP). The councillor now wants to limit the number of exceptions that can be made to the procurement rules.
Such an exception was claimed by the Swiss National Body for Building and Logistic recently when it awarded a contract for Microsoft software licences, skipping public procurement. Following complaints from the open source advocacy group ch/open, a court last month declared the contract legally invalid.
In May ch/open also protested against a Microsoft contract signed by the city council of Bern. After talking to council representatives, the open source advocacy group refrained from entering a formal complaint. In a joint press conference, the city councillors promised that from now on, they would consider using open source software. Speaking on their behalf, Retro Burn, general secretary of the finance department, said he "strongly supported" the use of open source solutions in the future.
The Group Digital Sustainability was formed in May to promote the use of open source in Swiss administration. It now has 21 members from six political parties.
More information:
Webseite des Kanton Bern (German or French)
Parlamentarische Gruppe Digitale Nachhaltigkeit (in German or French)
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