NL: Procurement's preference for open source fails to attract vendors
Basing a financial reporting system on open source is apparently not yet an option for public administrations. The Dutch city of Groningen earlier this year published a request for such a system, explaining it would choose from the vendors that offered to build this on top of an application server using open standards. None of the vendor offered that approach.
"All based their solution on the proprietary Oracle Application Server, whereas we prefer to use the open source alternative JBoss. So in the next round we had to drop open standards as a knock-out criteria. We wrote that we have a strong wish for open standards", the city's IT department writes in a letter to the city council on 19 November.
The department says it had to be pragmatic in order to continue the procurement process. "However, this solution did affect the ambition of the municipality to adopt open standards."
Groningen uncovered a similar problem with the municipality's application servers to be used for its citizen registration (Gemeentelijke Basisregistratie, GBA). Its IT services provider, Pink Roccade, told the municipality it would use the proprietary SAP Netweaver to build this application. "It also told us that upgrades to our GBA application and Education application would be based on SAP Netweaver."
"Our conclusion is that municipalities may want to use open source and open standards, but that the market is certainly not ready yet, or does not wish to be ready yet. It remains important for us to make the market aware that they should take their responsibility. On the other hand, we have to be reasonable; if there really are no alternatives, we will have to, under protest, select the best viable option."
The IT department suggests the city's administration to not add these proprietary systems to the city's IT standards, but to tolerate them.
Commenting on the report to the city council, Peter Wouters, manager at the Information and Administration department in the city, says: "I don't think that IT service providers do this deliberately. But we are very disappointed that they are not able to offer solutions based on open standards. It is time that companies realise that if they do not use open standards, their time is up."
OpenOffice pilot
The IT department also writes in the report that it has yet to begin its trials with a vendor independent desktop PC. It has temporarily halted the use of the open source web browser Firefox, tying this with the migration to OpenOffice that is currently being studied and piloted.
The city of Groningen in July 2006 decided to increase its use of open standards and open source software. In 2007 it decided not to renew its licences for Microsoft Office but instead start a migration to OpenOffice. In August this year the city decided to renew its licences for Microsoft operating system. "There is no way we can move to an alternative operating system in the short or medium term."
More information:
Report to the city council on implementation of open source and open standards (in Dutch, PDF)
Letter to the city council regarding the renewal of operating system licence contract (in Dutch, PDF)
Document Actions
