[EU] European "partwise" Open Source GIS-Tender

[till.adams at fossgis.de]

Dear list!

I come up, because we stumbled over this tender:
https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-display.html?cftId=1824

(and although most of you may regard me as the "guy who was chair of 
FOSS4G 2016 in Bonn", I write as managing director of terrestris and 
mundialis, two SME's having an Open Source business model.)

Summary
EUROSTAT, europes statistical agency, is seeking a contracting company, 
that delivers GIS services worth 17.5 million €uros for the upcoming 4 
years (or ~7.5k person days per year !!).
In the tender they define two main technical directions: ESRI and Open 
Source - and they name every popular OSGeo project such as GeoServer, 
Geonetwork Open Source, OpenLayers, QGIS, PostGIS, GRASS etc..
Also they clearly define, that Open Source must be favoured, if ever 
possible.


My thoughts:
Regarding our Open Source business landscape, I see huge problems for 
any of our Open Source SME's to have any chance in even participate in 
this tender. Nobody of us, even if we all would come together, could 
approximately deliver such an amount of person days and we are not able 
to prove that we can deliver knowledge in ESRI technology to their 
reasonable satisfaction.  My guess is, that on the proprietary side of 
the market there are huge full service companies, that are capable in 
delivering these magnitudes of services and who can argue "yes, we can 
also deliver Open Source knowledge". Our landscape of service providers 
with an open business model is quite heterogeneous with many small and 
medium-sized companies, often very specialized on single aspects or 
software packages. This will in the end lead to the fact, that even if 
EU favours to use Open Source Software, these services are provided not 
from companies from our community.

And this matters two things in my eyes:
1. The money paid for Open Source will not (or only partwise) be 
invested into our community and into our projects
2. The contracted service provider will presumably not favour Open 
Source software and with that the goal clearly defined by EUROSTAT 
degenerates to a well-intentioned idea


What I want:
In general I wanted to let you all know about this tender and the 
drifts, that also in the EU take place towards Open Source. All together 
I would be happy, if we can start a discussion about how to deal with 
tenders like this in the future and how we, as an European Community, 
can operate towards the EU for a better understanding of Open Source and 
also our Open Source business models.


BTW: Also a good discussion on this here on this list could be a good 
starting point to show the appropriate people from EU, that we are here!
Happy about any contribution to this!

Till