There's a government procurement bid going on in Romania for creating the software and infrastructure to modernize criminal records' access within the country and to interoperate with European countries' similar systems.
It is likely to become one of the many overpriced, poorly specified and poorly implemented solutions that are cranked out by companies that would not survive in the private sector but are close to the decision-makers and are tacitly supported by large IT companies whose proprietary software and expensive hardware have key roles such projects. Nothing new here.
What sets it apart however from other cases, at least to my knowledge is that in the general requirements section there's a small paragraph stating:
"All versions of sofware that are part of the offer must not be published under a 'free software license' - GPL or similar"
So far, while definitely the exceptions, there still were Apache, MySQL or Linux server deployments under the umbrella of various public projects but I have not seen cases of explicitly forbidding open source software in a project's requirement.
There were phrasings such as 'must run well in .NET/Win2003' which could be explained by lack of awareness of other platforms but this is very explicit, without a rationale given.
The 101 page requirements document is so obviously put together by people who have little knowledge of technology but who make up for that by generous use of enterprise buzzwords and ridiculous requirements (DB must allow storage of large quantities of records for ex a 100 million, system must run SQL commands without locking the whole table but only affected records) that all the silliness in it is not even funny.
I am not sure if it is entirely financed by the Romanian government or EU funds are sunk into it as well, but either way, sigh.
Ironically the criterion for picking the winner of the tender is 'lowest price'.
Links in romanian
Summary info on the tender
Specs/requirements document
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
At least they call it GNU Linux ;)
That requirement, quite aside from the contemptible ignorance that makes up the rest of the technical documents is politically dangerous.
If you are Romanian, then you must fight this.
If these politically motivated requirements are not challenged, you will find worse ignorances follow it.
It's called "GRAFT".
Welcome to government.
GPL license could be bad from a security point of view. GPL requires the derivative code to be published into the open, which makes it easier to attack.
As long as they support other open-source licenses I don't see the problem
Happs RJ: wrong, wrong, wrong!
1. GPL only force you to publish your patches/modified version if and only if you distribute binaries outside your organization.
2.The fact that an application use open source software doesn't implies that it is free/libre/open source itself: have you heard of java Apps? Apple iphone apps? Android apps?
finally, as soon as you publish the program, anyone can try to break it "at home", reading the source or using a debugger... I would say that the only difference is that proprietary software takes longer to get security fixes:-)
(BTW, no single organization can claim not use OSS nowadays!)
That's really sad. No doubt that there was some wining and dining from Microsoft here.
Post a Comment