The city executives of the Swiss city of Bern are criticised by Evangelical People's Party (EPP) council member Matthias Stürmer for ignoring free and open alternatives for the city's computer server needs. The executives last week renewed a contract for proprietary server operating systems without asking the council for financial approval.
The city council has to be involved in all contracts worth more than 300,000 Swiss francs (CHF), says the council member. For this particular offer, licences for server operating systems, the proprietary software vendor lowered its earlier price, 330,165 CHF (about 275 thousand euro) to 299, 504 CHF (about 248 thousand euro).
"The vendor referred to changes in the licence terms, saying that it now counts the number of CPU cores instead of the number of client CPUs", says Stürmer. He believes the vendor simply lowered the price on purpose in order to prevent the city council from becoming involved. "This is not a coincidence."
He calls it a dumb move. "The contract renewal was hotly debated during yesterday's meeting of the Bern city council members at the start of the Bern group of Digital Sustainability."
The city executive board told the council that moving to alternative servers operating systems, in particular Linux, would not result in savings on proprietary licences. The board said moving to Linux would increase costs 'due to the high dependency on certain business applications in use by the city', says Stürmer.
The council member thinks the executive board acted on a recommendation from the IT department. He will meet the IT department this week. "I hope to learn why they decided to play it this way. I'm very interested to find out if they take serious the city council's call for making more use of free and open source."
The council member also wants to know why Bern can't switch to Linux servers for email, backup, network name services and network monitoring. "In these areas Linux servers have excellent track records and proven their worth."
The city council member, involved in the Swiss parliament's group on Digital Sustainability is a well-known advocate of open source and open standards. He says that strong-arming IT departments to switch to open source rarely works. "There are so many dependencies and so many options that IT departments can always find a way to block a move to free and open source."
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