[Discussioni] Bolzano facing protests over licence deal forced by vendor lock-in

[Marco Ciurcina]

http://www.osor.eu/news/it-bolzano-facing-protests-over-licence-deal-forced-
by-vendor-lock-in

IT: Bolzano facing protests over licence deal forced by vendor lock-in
— filed under: [T] Deployments and Migrations, [GL] Italy, public sector, [T] 
Legal Aspects
by Gijs Hillenius — published on May 28, 2010

The decision on Tuesday by the administration of the Bolzano region to renew 
the proprietary software licences for it's servers, will be challenged by 
Associazione per il Software Libero (Assoli), an advocacy group on free and 
open source. The group says the region should have investigated alternatives 
and should have issued a call for tender.

The Bolzano administration on 25 May decided to spend 2.2 million Euro to 
renew proprietary licences for the next three years. In its decision, the 
administration admits it is forced to renew the licence contract: "There are 
no alternatives for the development of the IT system. Changing these essential 
and central servers would be irresponsible. The administration fails the 
resources and expertise for such a change."

The administration says it is forced to buy proprietary licences because it 
plans to offer applications for internal communication and collaboration. 
"These tools are part of the e-government demands made on our IT 
infrastructure."

The decision is criticised by Assoli president, lawyer Marco Ciurcina. "We 
will write a protest letter to the administration and the Italian and European 
competition authorities", Ciurcina announced.

"Bolzano's decision is made without considering free software alternatives, 
which is required by law since 2005. Even worse, this decision was adopted 
without a public tender. Spending 2.2 million just like that is not a good 
example in this period of crisis. This is not helping the local economy. We 
will do all that we can to correct this big mistake."

According to other Assoli members, Bolzano' regions IT department has been 
trained since 2002 in using free and open source applications including Grass 
open source geopgraphic information system, the Linux operating system, MySQL 
and PostgreSQL database, the OpenLDAP directory server and mail server 
Postfix.

The Bolzano administration could not immediately provide a response. The 
director of the IT department declined to comment.