[CLUG] FW: Government contract with Microsoft

[adam beecher]

FYI, response from Karlin Lillington.

I have to say that I'm still of the belief that - assuming there isn't an
/easy/ story here - it would be more constructive for the OSS community to
concentrate on making sure that this doesn't happen again. As I said in my
previous post, we have three years to do that, and a very simple way to
start - particularly for a small but pretty clued-in and reasonably
tight-knit community like the CLUG - would be to shoulder our way into local
Government a bit at a time. There's no way we can get on the desktop at the
moment - although it has to be said that the GUI is catching up to Windows
pretty damn fast these days - but if we could start replacing all those
Exchange and IIS intranet servers, it'd be a pretty good start. Will the MS
deal preclude this though?

adam


-----Original Message-----
From: Karlin Lillington
Sent: 13 June 2002 00:02
To: adam beecher
Subject: RE: Government contract with Microsoft

[...]

My understanding is that this contract was all properly
done; Jamie was the one who wrote up the story on it initially. I seem to
remember a conversation with someone in govt abbout it having gone to
tender, at the point when it went to tender. However I've had other email
about this issue as well, though, from open source advocates wondering if
Linux was considered and if not, why not. The main person I need to ask
about this has been on holidays for two weeks and is only just back. I'll
see what I can find out and drop you an email back.

[...]

If this looks like it could shape into a story I will talk to Jamie

[...]


-----Original Message-----
From: adam beecher [mailto:ad at m.beecher.net]
Sent: 04 June 2002 12:51
To: Karlin Lillington
Subject: Government contract with Microsoft


Karlin,

I've been meaning to mention to this to someone, but it slipped by me: Do
you know anything about this recent contract the Government signed with
Microsoft? It's a multi-year contract - three years I think - but it doesn't
seem to be listed on the eTenders website. We had a discussion about this on
the CLUG (Cork Linux User Group) mailing list recently, and although I was
trying to drum up support for making sure it doesn't happen again, some of
the guys seemed to think that it might be worthy of an investigation. I
think they may be right if it didn't go out to tender.

I won't go into the advantages and disadvantages of moving to Open Source
software, but I can provide some background and point you in the direction
of a couple of case studies if necessary.

Thanks,
adam