RO: Government promises to study benefits of open source next time

The government over the past two months has been criticised by open source advocacy groups and Romanian IT service providers, for having signed a three-year software licence deal worth 100 million euro with Microsoft.

In the interview Sandu explains the contract was signed in a hurry. "It was a force majeure. On April 26 all licenses expired and I had an urgent request from the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry to renew the contract. We would not have been able to do any government work."

"We can not move away from Microsoft overnight", Sandu told the newspaper. According to him, this would risk business continuity.

The newspaper also quotes Gabriel Marin, director of IT service provider Omnilogic. He says public administrations in Romania have paid Microsoft over a quarter billion euro in the last five years, without requesting public tenders. "This has made local IT firms irrelevant."

According to Tibi Turbureanu, chairman of the Ceata student organisation, Romania's minister for education Ecaterina Andronescu was surprised by the software deal. When asked about the agreement, she commented the government spends more on proprietary software than on education, the Ceata chairman wrote on the Galceava (Discord) mailing list.

eRomania

The Romanian government on 16 June launched a project to increase e-Government services. In the Ziarul Financiar interview, Minister Sandu says 'eRomania project' will probably use lots of open source applications, since one of the main objectives is interoperability of government IT systems. "We will create conditions favourable to open source."

According to a report on ePractice, the electronic government services on the e-Romania portal are planned to help reduce costs by 30 to 70 percent.

More information:

Ziarul Financiar news item (in Romanian)

ePractice item on eRomania

Ceata mailing list (in Romanian)