alt Hacker NewsThis. I've been around these kind of pushes in my part oif EU for a long time and the reality is: there's a lot of talk and demands and not many people signing up for tenders, development or maintenance work.
The opinion is that "the public workers don't need it" for every feature missing in Linux or LibreOffice. I can only imagine how a fight to upstream such features would look like even if someone took on a support contract.
With Microsoft at least the governments get shared fate with large corpos who also need enterprise features.
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nikanj • yesterday at 8:04 PM
It's usually clear to all parties that the tendering process is theatre, and they've already picked the company that'll get the contract
I'd sign up for tenders, but they all seem to require a company with "1 million EUR revenue in public sector <whatever> projects" and 5 people with various roles, degrees and X years of experience in <whatever>.
I'm just a freelancer with FLOSS experience and some commercial experience, and so are plenty other FLOSS contributors. Nobody's going to create a company and hire staff just to have a chance at getting selected in the one tender a year that allows outsiders in.
The idea might be that only companies which have already proven themselves elsewhere can enter, but 1) then why the "public sector work revenue" requirement? And 2) that's not going to work for industries where government interest is much larger than private interest, like FLOSS.
But I suppose governments prefer the certainty that Accenture or local equivalents bring - a price an order of magnitude too high for a mediocre result and a 25% chance that the project will be fucked up and shelved, over the uncertainty of a small startup, who could either deliver something great, or overexert themselves and not finish at all...