Public administrations trick procurement rules in IT projects
Public administrations in Europe are circumventing procurement law when tendering IT solutions, says Mathieu Paapst, who teaches Law and IT at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
"Providers of open source IT solutions do not get the same chance as do proprietary vendors", Paapst says. "Europe's current procurement rules are not helping to create a level playing field. Governments should take affirmative action."
Public administrations are employing at least seven different tricks to make sure they will get the IT solution they prefer, Paapst discovered analysing all kinds of IT procurement proposals published over the past few years.
Often public organisations will simply request specific brands or software products. Alternatively, they will publish a request for a reseller of all kinds of software licences, deciding afterwards what software to pick.
A third method to ensure open source can not be offered, is to demand that a IT solution provider has sold some threshold amount of licences. "Demanding at least half a million euro turnover in licences, is a very effective knock-out criterion."
"The fourth trick is to publish for instance a request an open source content management system (CMS), but demand at the same time that the IT service provider has experience with a proprietary CMS." The fifth method is to purchase hardware, knowing full-well that this mostly comes with proprietary software pre-installed.
"I've seen public administrations that say solution providers may not offer products for free, saying that this is to prevent underbidding. But it means that open source options are out." The seventh trick that Paapst discovered is that public administrations will add costs from migrating from the currently used solution to the new provider. "If they have to train their staff, for instance, they will add these costs to the open source solution. This means that any organisation using a proprietary ERP system will never move to an open source alternative."
According to Paapst, this is not the way procurement rules were intended. "The European court of Justice specifically says that the current supplier and new contenders must have equal opportunity."
Free software law
Paapst, who until the end of this month also works as legal specialist for the Dutch government resource centre on open source and open standards (NOiV), yesterday was one of the speakers at the European Open Source and Free Software Law Event, that took place at the European Parliament.
The event brought together about sixty lawyers, legal specialists, members of the European parliament and their assistants. Other topics presented during the event included the difficulties of mixing applications published under various open source licences, mixing proprietary and open source licences and the possible effects of cloud computing on open source.
More information:
European Open source and free software law event
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