Trade Group Calls For Level Playing Field, Publishes Guideline On Procurement

Public administrations should give a fair chance to open source when procuring IT solutions, says the OSB Alliance, a trade group for some ninety German, Swiss and Austrian open source ICT service providers. "All other things being equal, open source software should be preferred because of its benefits." The trade group is disseminating a manual to help public administrations tweak their procurement requests - to take into account free and open source solutions.

The guideline is meant to be useful to both the procuring agencies and the solution providers. The documents explains where the usual contract clauses become incompatible with free and open source software, and offers concrete workarounds and replacement texts. The text covers the five so-called EVB-IT templates that Germany's public administration are obliged to use for drafting IT procurement contracts and dealing with development, architecture, maintenance, services and provisioning.