Swiss Court Stops Microsoft Contract
The complaint from 18 open source service providers against the contract deal between Microsoft and the Swiss Federal Office of Construction and Logistics (BBL) has paid off. The Swiss Supreme Court has stopped the deal in its tracks.
As the Neue Zürcher Zeitung announced in a May 28 article, the Supreme Court in Berne issued a temporary injunction against the Swiss federal office essentially preventing them from paying Microsoft 42 million Swiss francs over the next three years for licenses on government computers. The reason the court gave was that the contract did not follow the prescribed public call for offers process. Excluded from the contract are major purchases required to operate the federal computer infrastructure. They will be put on ice and will probably go through a public bid tender, although that is not yet certain.
Putting in the challenge against the three-year contract from February between BBL and Microsoft of around 25 million Euro were Red Hat and 17 other claimants. The BBL had made Microsoft's bid public in early May in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce.
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