The Hungarian government says it will negotiate the price of the open source software it is acquiring with the open source IT service provider that wins a tender for a four-year contract.

The Hungarian government in early April surprised open source software firms and advocacy groups with its announcement of a tender worth 6 billion HUF (about 20 million euro) "for licences for software which offers interoperability through open standards." The government wants to procure these licences for government and educational institutes.

Responding to questions on how the government is going to pay for licences of open source software, which can be downloaded for free, representatives say "the procurement costs of free software will be determined in the course of the negotiations with the supplier that wins the tender."

The tender was published on 16 April, along side a request for the same amount for 12 billion HUF for Microsoft licences and 6 billion HUF for Novell licences. "This is to ensure equal treatment [of proprietary and open source software] to Hungarian centralised software procurements in the field of public administration and education."

The spokesperson said that it took a year to prepare the documents and that "professional Hungarian organisations and producers and dealers" took part in the process.

According to a source closely involved, a number of Hungarian IT firms are now preparing bids for the open source/open standards contract. "These are mostly resellers or partners of IBM, Sun Microsystems, Novell or Red Hat."

The open source firms consider the tender to focus only on open IT standards, saying it does not really request open source software. "Considering that the government used to only request proprietary software licences, this new tender is a step forward, albeit a very confusing one."

The government denies the tender is puzzling. "The request is for both, that is, open source and open standards products."

More information:

Tender document (in Hungarian)