Етикет: microsoft

Nov 4th

Today the Ministry of State Administration and Administrative Reform has announces a tender for the purchase of 60 000 new licenses for Microsoft products by the year 2012. The interesting fact this time is that the order is specifically given for this company’s products.

According to the Ministry’s press release, “The few examples of migrations to other platforms show a necessity of serious financial resources, including for retraining of the staff to work with the new software systems, as well as a long enough period of implementation.”

What’s wrong with that?

1. „The experts“ don’t have a clue what it is all about.
2. The state will spend millions to purchase those licenses
3. It will oblige our Administration to use this company’s products by 2012
4. It will give all the data, used or stored by the Administration, in the hands of a commercial organisation
5. It will surrender the management of all the State Administration’s processes on local and national level in the hands of a single company and its products
6. The purchase of software from Microsoft leads to dependence on one company, contributes to the brain drain and it is unnecessary spending for us tax-payers. The money may be spent on development and research activities for Bulgarian projects and trainings of the state administration to work with open source based software.

The State becomes a hostage of a single company

It is known for years that the Microsoft OS is like a black box. You have put inside it everything you know, but you actually don’t know what is inside it and how exactly it works. What will happen if in one nice moment it just starts to change its properties on its own, which is what is happening now according to this news?

What will happen if all your documents disappear mysteriously? Because this black box may start destroying them in this very moment, and according to its license its manufacturer is not responsible and even if he is, it doesn’t matter that much since our entire administration works with it.
Sell something to someone and keep your customer a hostage – great strategy! Having in mind that 80% of the state structures are using Windows, what would happen if the OS stops working because it has downloaded the new version of a given file?

You trust something you don’t know how it works and what it consists of. You’ve got yourselves a black box and you are building all your work over it. And it is going to explode soon. 5 millions Skype users already felt what it was like to rely on the black box and its ability to update itself. Great! Bravo! Hurray! And what if the state stops working? I mean if it really stops working? No state administration, police, army, electricity?

The state is paying millions for years so it can depend on private interests? Until when we are going to lack the certainty that we are living in a country which can provide it own security alone?

According to this information „Microsoft Bulgaria will provide about $1 million to build a national network for the training of 30,000 civil servants in computer skills, managing director Teodor Milev told journalists on Tuesday.

On May 17, State Administration Minister Dimitar Kalchev and the director of Microsoft Bulgaria signed an agreement by which the state administration would receive 30,000 packages of MS Windows XP and MS Office XP software in Bulgarian. The cost of the programme products is $13,650,000 or $455 per package. According to the agreement, Microsoft Bulgaria will cover the training costs. “

This information is from 20 Jun 2002 and if you guest so, this never happened

Two civil organizations will approach the prosecutor’s office today. The reason is the new contract, prepared by the Ministry of State Administration, for software purchase, which is going to be signed with Microsoft. This was announced yesterday by /Open Projects Foundation /and the civil initiative /Spravedlivost (Justice)./

The signal to the Prosecutor is instigated by the Ministry’s call for tender, which seeks a supplier of 60 000 Microsoft licenses for the needs of the state administration. According to the lawyer of the two organizations, Mr Ivan Gruykin, the announced procedure may be interpreted as a criminal breach of trust, aiming to favour one of the world’s richest people – Bill Gates and his company.

Apart from the Prosecutor, the organizations will approach other authorities as well, namely the Public Internal Financial Control Agency, which according to the Public Tenders Act possesses the power to stop the procedure.

The two organizations are considering how to approach the Commission for Protection of Competition, which is also a controlling authority, but only a participant in the tender has the right to make an appeal.

The order value is about 90 millions of leva, and that makes 1500 per software package – a price which exceeds the market price several times. When announcing the tender Minister Nikolay Vasilev said that he was going to organize a press conference to find out if the officials were able to use free open source software and if he was convinced, he would stop the tender. The deadline for submission of the offers is the 10th of December.