Dutch GOUD tender needs work

[Jelle de Jong]

Ciaran O'Riordan wrote:
> A friend has told me that the Dutch government has issued a tender that
> blatantly violateds the government's own open standards statements or
> policies.  It's a tender from about 7 ministries for 22,000 desktop
> computers with specific references to MS technologies such as Active
> Directory when LDAP would suffice.
> 
> The tender's called "GOUD" and the choice of technologies is expected to be
> used by the government for the next 5-10 years.
> 
> This could be stopped either by writing to the Dutch government or to the
> European Commission, but writing such a letter takes work to find the
> relevent Dutch government policies or European laws, who to send it to etc.
> 
> If we want a government to take a stand against rigged tenders, the Dutch
> government seems a good candidate due to it's outspoken support of open
> standards.
> 
> Is anyone interested in working on this?
> (or does anyone know of free software supporters already working on it?)
> 

Hi Ciaran,

A few parities have been working on informing the government about 
open-standards and free software. The problem is that there there are 
too many stakeholders that are forcing Microsoft technologies. A lot of 
parties still don't see the need for change.

We are kind of waiting for a little Microsoft/security/document disaster 
to wakeup decision makers so they finally see the need and change there 
policy's. There is also a lot of talking  but too little actual work 
being done and lack of any official public support.

So it's not a pretty situation, and a lot of work and attitude change is 
needed

A few parties working on it are the people working for the below websites:

http://www.livre.nl/
http://dewinter.com/
http://gendo.nl/
http://webwereld.nl/

Kind regards,

Jelle de Jong