The European Commission is distorting the market by failing to rid itself of IT vendor lock-in, charges the Free Software Foundation Europe in a press release on Tuesday. Being "extremely disappointed", the group protests the signing of a contract worth tens of millions of euro for proprietary licences, and accuses the Commission of being lazy in its approach to software procurement.
According to the group, the EC unjustly claims it has no choice due to a lack of alternatives. "Even the most basic market analysis would have told the Commission there's a vibrant free software industry in Europe that the EC can rely on", states the press release. The FSFE further claims the EC has made no serious effort to find solutions based on open standards. "In consequence, a large part of Europe's IT industry is essentially locked out of doing business with the Commission", it says.
The advocacy group says the EC should have set a positive example for public administrations. It points out that across the EU many public administrations have successfully switched to alternative solutions for office automation. Some of these public administrations have even asked the EC for practical and moral support, the FSFE points out, referring to a 2011 request by the German city of Munich. "This latest move by the Commission will seem a cruel joke to them", the group writes.
Competing alternatives
In January, the European Commission's Secretary-General, Catherine Day, responded to questions by then-member of the European Parliament Amelia Andersdotter over the EC's office automation strategy. In her response, the Secretary-General refers to a strategy paper, where the EC admits it is locked-in by a single proprietary vendor for desktop operating systems and office productivity tools.
According to this strategy, the EC will not change its desktop PC environment, but will explore ways to introduce alternative or competing technologies for email, calendaring, collaboration and unified communications. The EC will also prepare the next tender, which it writes "will be carried out in full service mode once consolidation efforts have been completed and the current paradigm shift in the market has stabilised", aiming to buy services instead of specific brands.
The FSFE said it was exploring all options, when asked if it had considered taking legal action.
Comments
I think the fact that H2020 templates are MS Word only (not even the small effort to offer a ODT versoin), is rather emblmentic. Sure, Libre/Open-office will open doc files, and of course this is not the core issue here, but I think its somehow iconic: H2020 is the cutting edge research initiative by the EC, already since FP7 open source has penetrated as a value in various ICT projets and here we are with official documents in doc and IE with Adobe Reader... :-)