Red Hat Sues Switzerland

Apparently large cajones are not in short supply at the offices of Red Hat, developer of the the most well-known business version of Linux. The company has undertaken the task of fighting for its survival, one client at a time.

This time, the client is the Swiss government, that Red Hat blames for choosing Microsoft products without any public bidding process.

from PC Pro in the UK

Red Hat has sued the Swiss Government for adopting Microsoft products without any public bidding process.

In a post on the Red Hat blog, the company outlines its  appeal, together with 17 other companies, to a Swiss federal court to overturn a three-year contract issued to Microsoft by the Swiss Federal Bureau for Building and Logistics.

Red Hat claims the contract is worth £8 million a year, but was given to Microsoft without any public bidding process. The Swiss bureau reportedly argued when challenged that there was no alternative to Microsoft products.

However, the open-source company has countered this argument by pointing out that it already supplies technology to other Swiss organisations.

According to the blog, the case “raises important issues of openness in government and of a level playing field for open source and other competitors of Microsoft. Red Hat is seeking a public bidding process that allows for consideration of the technical and commercial advantages of open source software products.”

Microsoft has yet to offer a statement on the case.

But of course, Microsoft has no reason to give a statement, for it has no win with anything it could possibly say. The EU might be looking at this a little more carefully than normal with the impending release of Windows 7, later this year. With the already worrisome problems of the last disaster still stinging European offices of Microsoft, it does make the next step taken seem momentous.

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