Last month, one of the most important Free Software / Open Source conferences from Romania and Eastern Europe took place in Bucharest, where there were important topics on strategic software issues discussed. I was amazed to realise that nobody from the Romanian Government was present, organizers sent them invitations though.
How is the scenario in Romania?
In 2004, Romanian Government signed a contract with Microsoft for renting licences to be used in Romanian Public Administration. Because of this, Romanian government is going to spend ~111 million Euros (indeed, the contract expired last month, but Romanian Government will still have to pay 58 million Euros by the fall of this year). Since the contract expired last month, Ministeries and Public bodies were unable to use Microsoft products, so Romanian Government approved the order of Communication Ministry to spend another 100 million Euros for Microsoft licences. 100 million Euros from the national budget which are going to be paid starting by 2010. Despite Romanian critical situation (no enough money for infrastructure development, salaries etc.) they are spending money on licences which are not so necessary for the moment.
Let’s see now the Educational side.
By November last year, there was a bid for companies to provide high school’s IT infrastructure (PC computers and Software). As expected, the winner was Siveco, which “has played hard” on the Educational sector for many years, being one of the main IT equipment and educational software providers in schools. And they include, “of course”, only Microsoft Windows Operating System and their AEL educational platform, which is proprietary as well (a large part of AEL demonstartive lessons are actually made using Adobe Flash). Other 148 million Euros have gone on IT equipaments and software for schools, and other 128 million Euros for renewing existing laboratories. Siveco Company is obvious, a company which monopolises the Educational market since 2001 through their strategic partnership with the Ministery of Education and Research. Here is an article (in Romanian).
Word is spreading…
News on osor.eu: http://www.osor.eu/news/ro-proprietary-licence-deal-draws-ire-open-source-proponents/?searchterm=None
http://www.edri.org/edri-gram/number7.11/open-source-microsoft-europe
http://www.setimes.com/cocoon/setimes/xhtml/en_GB/features/setimes/roundup/2009/05/18/roundup-st-03
http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/romania-issues–100-million-to-microsoft-without-bids-1003
http://www.fsdaily.com/Government/Romanian_government_spends_450_mEUR_on_Microsoft
In a future post I’m going to write about how we can help Romanian Government understand that there are other solutions. People who participated at eLiberatica started discussing about a new NGO (see Lucian’s post: http://www.cianblog.com/2009/06/11/something-very-special-happened-the-birth-of-the-first-official-floss-nonprofit-organization-in-romania/ . Good luck with the new NGO, I hope people involved will manage to change things (also, I promised to help them in my free time). One of the positive aspects in Romania is that an increasing number of FLOSS communities are becoming active. Compared to 4 – 5 years ago, the number of local FLOSS communities and students who are embracing open source have been growing exponentially, this makes me believe that changes will occur one day soon.