Romanian government tender prohibits open source

[J65nko]

From http://h-online.com/-1323182

According to a report on OSOR.eu, the EU's Open Source Observatory and Repository, an IT procurement tender issued by the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) explicitly bans the use of open source software in any offer made in response. The tender concerns the development of an "Information System of Romanian Criminal Records (Rocris)", with a budget of approximately 2.85 million euros.

This development is directed towards the European Union's intention to establish, at a European level, an interoperable system to enable the exchange of information on the previous convictions of criminals. The Romanian ministry claims that it is this requirement for interoperability that has forced it to ban the use of software that is "published under a 'free software license' - GPL or similar".

[jggimi]

It is very common to have bid requests specify technical requirements in such a way that a single supplier becomes the sole source, or that an unwanted supplier is eliminated. In this way, the purchasing organization can provide the appearance of a competitive bid process, yet still award it to the favored vendor. Sometimes, the favored vendor may consult on the drafting of the bid request.

Disclaimer: I do not know if this particular bid process had this sort of embedded vendor bias, of course. But it is common enough that I would not be surprised if it did.

[Oko]

I see nothing strange about above tender! The same is true in U.S. for various government and state agencies. The ban on open source software is very common. Sometimes there are legitimate "technical" reasons for the ban sometimes a particular vendor has "legally" cornered the marker using lobbing. It is very possible that Romanian government has legally binding contract with Microsoft or some other large vendor for that matter which might be enforced by a state entity. It is very common that the State Department backs up U.S. based multinational corporations in legal cases against other "sovereign" government (I hope my Romanian friends forgive me this sarcasm as Serbian state is a "client state" of U.S. as much as Romanian if not more).

[J65nko]

For some more news about this : http://h-online.com/-1330890