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

[María Arias de Reyna]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 11:30 AM,  <till.adams at fossgis.de> wrote:
> 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
>

Hi Till,

Part of the idea of the european chapter was precisely to be able to
¿lobby? in favor of open source. (I am not sure if lobby is the right
word, in Spanish it has a bad meaning, related to corruption). In
GeoCat we discussed this internally and it was very discouraging that
it was so ESRI oriented.

While we solve the legal issues about setting up an official european
chapter (which reminds me, we have a list of TO-DO things pending!),
what do you suggest we can do? Maybe write a formal letter signed by
many european companies asking the European Commission to avoid naming
specific companies or software? Maybe we can try to set up a meeting
with the responsible persons of this tender to try to explain the good
things about being more open (and how the money will be reinvested in
local companies instead of the big monopolistic one)?

Regards,
María.