Was specially designed for that work. These many thousands of special programs were designed for the windows operating system and the more complex Information Technology becomes the more our Public Institutions become dependent on the microsoft monopoly. Its a problem that Martin Charbel the former german director general for Information Technology knows well it. Isnt the german off orators are de facto dependent on microsoft because with very few exceptions microsoft products are used in every Government Office and. That means its not easy to use different software. All documents exist in microsoft format right employees are all trained to use microsoft programs the corresponding servers also run with Microsoft Software so of course theres also results and economic dependence to guide. I think thats what will happen if its continuous for another ten or twenty years or is already my personal concern is that the dependency of various manufacturers and the virtualization of our entire i. T. System meaning the relocation of i. T. Systems into the cloud into some distance. In the service that could be anywhere which would mean our governments ability to control and manage its own ninety is constantly diminishing and in that sense our public agencies are no longer able to determine how secure their i. T. Is now secure the data of its citizens it can say how long it will take to implement new functions how expensive the right is how much they could save and so forth will be less and less able to provide this information. Dependency is the result of a Business Model with which the Major Software manufacturers and in particular microsoft have created monopolies a world wide keeping the source code a secret. Modern software is written in programming languages the source code is the recipe for each Software Program or operating system. Every i. T. Specialist can understand this source code but the computers dont understand source code it has to be transformed into binary machine code which only computers can read and understand. This is the source code for the command display hello world one of the first things you might learn in your first programming class. And this is what the command looks like translated into machine code. Microsoft only makes the machine code available to its customers but we cant decipher it ourselves microsoft keeps its source code a secret to protect itself from copycats. This is whats called the proprietary Business Model only the manufacturer is able to change improve correct and fix security gaps in the software for better or worse the users are completely at the mercy of the manufacturer. The data belonging to every citizen from tax returns to parking fines flows through the enormous data centers maintained by our governments. We pay a visit to one of the high security server farms in hamburg were not permitted to reveal its location let alone film it from the outside but all its security arrangements offer little protection against microsofts vulnerabilities. So this is just one of several data point Data Center Facilities data port is a Public Corporation owned by the state. We belong to the northern German Federal states including lower saxony and its municipalities we only handle Public Sector data show you one of our cooling rooms where the computers are kept. You can see them working away on both sides and they sing close spaces chemical. Proof of a door what role does microsoft play. Both proprietary and open Source Software in some areas proprietary software is used almost exclusively that includes actually pay for example also proprietary software but of course microsoft is used a lot of people are used to working with it and it has an almost daily factory monopoly position. We know that we have to reduce our dependency and use various strategies to minimize his dependancy on a case by case basis but its a balancing act. Which hasnt been working out with microsoft over the past ten years the German Government has doubled its outlay for microsoft licenses most Microsoft Microsoft is indeed a real challenge its not only public agencies that use microsoft products but also interest. Three and the private sector universities and so on. You could say weve created a culture that accepts this mechanism so its a real challenge to create alternatives that i do not even. Alternatives to microsoft have been around for a long time theyre based on a fundamentally different principle called open source. In contrast to the proprietary software sold by microsoft and other Companies OpenSource Software uses a source code thats publicly available. Thats why hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world can improve it expand on it and fix bugs. The collective work carried out by this swarm of programmers identifies and closes security gaps and efficiently produces state of the art Software Including the worlds most widely used operating systems linux and android unlike microsoft linux is available free of charge. Any organization or administration can customize it for its own purposes without asking a corporation for permission but most government i. T. Managers believe that there is no alternative to microsoft in Public Administration even though open Source Software has become a profitable industry. That its no longer true that alternatives dont exist that may be true twenty years ago when you had to install the software on your windows p. C. So why arent european states making the switch to free themselves from this dependency. It reminds me of the Renewable Energy debate people said solar power was impossible it didnt work it was too expensive look at what we have no problem that on some days germany produces nearly one hundred percent of its electricity from renewables so how did that change come about because they made it easier provided incentives and then all of a sudden people realized hey it does work its the same with software. Why such resistance from the authorities in this forget the microsoft monopoly arose thirty five years ago when an entire industry has developed around it and many people are invested in maintaining it many are sitting in government and Public Agency i. T. Departments they dont want things to change because they know it will cut into their business. Model open Source Programs can compete with microsoft products as the company open exchange demonstrates. These are so can this software replace the entire office package. In this office to think you can do everything with this software that you can do with microsoft for example heres the email program and then we have an address book of course you can manage appointments tasks to do lists and keep track of all your files schools thats the human. Mind is the software also allows you to edit text. Create spreadsheets and of course create presentations. So that you know. What do you deal with all the documents from other people in public agencies constantly having multiple people working on a single document then the boss has decided theres a lengthy workload you cant handle that can you. Show which area you make it sound like using Office Software from the cloud instead of having it installed on your computer is completely normal but most people have never heard of it. You dont realize youre already using it if youre a one plus one or Telecom Vodafone arc or France Telecom customer and use their email program or calendar youre already using our system that is about your profit that we earn a living by offering professional support services to keep the systems up and running you know we only get paid by about one in every ten thousand users. But theyre very big and we are now for more than that we can provide our services to the other ninety nine point nine nine nine percent free of charge. Was not Good Business it is yes we are growing forty five percent per year for the last night. Open Source Software has long been standard in private corporations but global giants of the Digital Economy such as facebook Amazon Google pay pal only use open source they would never give their competitor microsoft access to their Information Technology. But european governments continue to submit to the old monopoly signing one contract after the next. These contracts stipulate the terms and conditions for the Government Agencies use of microsoft programs the German Ministry of the interior is legally obligated to allow inspection of such contracts but the ministry has blackened out all the key elements such as prices conditions and security requirements they say the reason is that microsoft is in forcing trade secrets. In other words the corporation is permitted to decide what the public may learn about its dealings with taxpayers money. With this framework contract the German Government permits all state institutions from local authorities to parliament to obtain software directly from microsoft resellers. Its a business worth billions of euros. But its legally questionable because agreements of this sort override European Union law it says that public authorities are prohibited from buying products and services exceeding the value of one hundred thirty five thousand euros from a single supplier without first issuing a public invitation to tender. That doesnt seem to worry peter but whos head of the German Interior Ministry how does he justify circumventing e. U. Public procurement law. In the call for tender does take place microsoft doesnt sell its products directly and uses intermediaries who put in bids and compete with one another. This is going to be like if it were destruction of buying new cars for its fleet and only inviting v. W. Dealers to put in a bid excluding all other manufacturers thats not competition. The tenders are initially open to everyone but the clear majority of the german Public Sector decides in favor of the Industry Standard rather than an open Source Solution which they regard as an experiment. And. So every municipality every state administration puts out a call for tender in accordance with the framework contract and we need new microsoft licenses who can give us the best deal. That may often be the case here but not necessarily in every case. Its not that simple either law doesnt allow Public Tenders to give preference to a specific company it also prohibits the specification of brand names and calls to tender but when it comes to microsoft states appear to be flouting that law at the university of groningen in the netherlands apart just a lawyer specializing in i. T. And public procurement has studied this practice so do Framework Agreements with microsoft violate e. U. Law. Yeah yeah thats very clear it violates european law and when you ask organizations you know why are you doing this the people responsible for the you should know this that its finally its european law but they will say well even the European Commission itself is doing its. Best to top e. U. Authorities breaking its own rules my colleague from the investigate europe journalist he has been a long time correspondent in brussels and knows who to ask. Ok who are we going to meet now we are going to need a leg responsible for the im thinking type you could ever write about microsoft i was already told they are going to sign a new contract with microsoft next year so collectively to the. Next. Microsoft and i already negotiating a new contract the plan is to go for a negotiated procedure with microsoft for. This top layer. And for full for tender with a reseller. For microsoft doesnt the practice to negotiate this framework contract violate the rules of procurement which demands open competition no doubt there are different procedures foreseen by the picture of untruths and of course the digital to procedure is called for tender but then the negotiated procedure is a procedure that exists in the roads and its fully legal and the conditions are that there is only one provider that can provide this particular solution the technical solution so there is no other possibility and what weve seen is that we if we didnt do call for tender an open call for tender for provision we would land with microsoft anyway and it would be much more expensive because what theyre doing now is negotiating a price list together with microsoft directly which gives this huge discount well it sounds very reasonable but this actually means that they have a problem within their organization. Because they are obviously locked in. They are in a sub optimal situation because they are so dependent on working with microsoft that they are even thinking that they cant function without the Microsoft Software itself more about their own organization then. The topic of law because it basically means that they have internal problem that they have to fix but it doesnt mean that there cant be this regard for human what does the procurement law exactly say for the procurement law describes. Several situations in which you can ask for a brand name being locked in is not an excuse to disregard the procurement rules. There are alternatives. Back in two thousand and four a social democratic mayor of munich christiane decided the City Administration would switch from Microsoft Windows to the open source Linux Operating System the project called emotes was considered a Great Success and was also copied in other european cities. In twenty twelve details it was the citys Economic Advisor at the time negotiated an agreement with microsoft to relocate its german headquarters to munich in twenty fourteen a writer became unix mayor and since then a social democratic mayor has joined forces with the conservatives on the city council to bring the munich administration back into the microsoft fold. And useless many of us in the c. S. U. Were against the decision back then. It was a decision based purely on the little cost far more than one hundred million a monopolist always wants to make sure it gets off a follow up contract. Its a huge waste of money please reconsider those thank you. But the mayor rejected these Data Security and anti monopoly arguments in his closing statement he also gave another reason to abandon linux. Weve tried to create workarounds but what weve been able to achieve doesnt compare to what ive seen in my private business dealings these past ten or fifteen years that is why i personally believe it would make sense to switch so can i call for the votes against the motion to. The greens the liberals the left and other opposition parties vote against the majority decide in favor thank you. Its to look at is the return to microsoft as payback for the company relocating its german headquarters to munich which is no negotiation a few years ago. No it certainly is not what i initiated and what we have voted for todays to improve our id modernize it and make it more effective and reliable for users in the if ministration and for our citizens. However a report showed that a large majority of City Employees were happy with the limerick system the report did find fault with munichs i T Administration but the problem was not with the Linux Software the problem was that the city gave i. T. Administrators in the various departments too much leeway to chart their own course according to the former head of munichs i. T. Department it was this lack of uniformity that was the problem not the underlying linux system City Employees were not permitted to grant us an interview but an expert from the city i. T. Department was willing to speak with us anonymously so is there some truth to the claim that the open source system in the munich City Government didnt work properly and others in two are all very disappointed weve always tried to make sure it all works smoothly and weve been quite successful in that in our training courses people are saying why should the system be changed it works and what others. Thousand forms were adapted to work with open Source Software what will happen to them now. The new template system will have to be created from Microsoft Office that will be expensive every single template will need to be converted or every department will have to manually create their own templates the way they used to do it will have an explosion of days which will become unmanageable at some point this isnt about technology its about politics linux was just a bargaining chip. Of course politics plays a role munich was ruled by the social democrats and gre