The hidden exit costs imposed by a previous software acquisition are a major reason for public administrations to tender software by naming brand names or specific products, which may be illegal, says a draft report by the European Commission's Open Source Observatory and Repository project (OSOR).
The report 'Guidelines on public procurement and Open Source Software', was released on Monday in Malaga, Spain, during the Open Source World Conference. The guideline is meant to explain to public administrators why it is useful to acquire Open Source and Open Standards software, and how they can do so under the current procurement rules.
According to the report, public administrations that are not selecting Open IT Standards when tendering software can cause contractual obligations to extend beyond the procurement period. This is not normally allowed by tender regulations. "The administration did not think about the exit costs five years ago, and now they are stuck", explained Rishab Ghosh, one of the authors of the guideline, who presented the study in the city of Malaga.
A basic assumption of public procurement is that at the end of the defined period, the public administrator has no contractual obligations towards the software vendor. This assumption breaks down for software based on proprietary standards. "If the software originally purchased makes it difficult to use documents and data with similar software from other producers, there is a high cost of changing software vendor", says the report.
"If you cannot quantify these exit costs, then you should limit them. If you cannot limit them, then you either need other software, or you need better criteria", Ghosh said on Monday. He called on public administrations to begin to properly evaluate the long term costs of the use of proprietary standards. "Public administrations need to keep their options open. Their documents and data must be available for ever."
Sustainable
According to the guideline, using Open IT standards will help to make public IT systems sustainable over the long term. "This implies lower costs over the longer term, but more importantly, reduces the users' reliance on the original vendors of the software."
The guideline recommends public administrations to list criteria for Open IT standards when they tender software, for example by requiring that the standard is implementable by all potential providers or does not restrict re-use.
Ghosh works at UNU-MERIT in The Netherlands, a research institute of the United Nations University and Maastricht University, one of the partners in the OSOR consortium.
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