[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Rishab Ghosh, who presented the guidelines at the Open
Source World Conference in Malaga, argued that the procurement
guidelines were needed because of two reasons. First, they studied
recent tenders and found that many explicitly mentioned proprietary
applications. 16% of 3615 software tenders explicitly asked for
products from top 10 software vendors, such as Microsoft, SAP and
Oracle. This practice may be illegal because public tenders
generally have to describe functional requirements in a general way
instead of specifying specific products. Second, many public
administrations don’t have any experience with the procurement of
FOSS. In fact, they often don’t know whether or under which
circumstances they are allowed to adopt and ask for FOSS solutions.
The guidelines are specifically designed in order to clearly and
simply explain how public administrations can acquire open source
and they don’t assume that a country has adopted a specific policy
regarding open source.”