Wednesday, May 22, 7:38 am

Romania Proprietary licence deal draws ire open source proponents

Written by Mel Kham on May 28, 2009. Posted in News

Romania Proprietary licence deal draws ire open source proponents

The Romanian government is about to spend millions of euro on proprietary software, drawing flak from the country’s budding open source movement. “This government is out of touch with reality.”

The Romanian government announced its renewal of a framework software licence with Microsoft in the middle of May. The framework licence deal is worth 100 million euro in software licences to be used by government agencies between 2010 and 2012. Romania will also pay the software giant another 58 million euro this fall, as the final payment for the 2004 – 2009 framework licence agreement that expired last month.

The government further announced the awarding of a 300 million euro contract to a Romanian IT company for PC hardware and Microsoft software licences to be used in education.

The announcement came just five days ahead of the third national open source conference, eLiberatica, taking place in Bucharest. One of the conference organisers, Lucian Savluc, condemned the government’s spend thrift. “The Romanian government is out of touch with reality. I hope that the European Union will protest this deal, for it is not in the best interest of the Romanian citizens.”

One of the speakers at the conference, Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) also expressed concern, warning about possible corruption. “This decision of the Romanian government seems careless and endangers the country’s sustainable economic growth by increasing its dependency on proprietary software and by wasting funds that would have been better used elsewhere, for instance on infrastructure.”

More information:

Mediafax news item (in Romanian)

Capital news item (in Romanian)

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1 Comment(s)

Mel Kham

Founder of Unixmen, Living in Amsterdam. Am working in my free time to help people to understand the Opensource and to explain them in easy way how to make the fist steps to the the light. Working day and night with my Co-founder Zinovsky to keep this website live even with less resources.

Norris Hawkins

Lucian Savluc is the one who is out of touch with reality. Romania wants the reliability and the dependability that comes from a commercial proprietary software model. Open source model, on the other hand, lack those traits hence they are garbage compared to proprietary software. I’m glad that Romania made a right decision in choosing proprietary software over open source software.

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