I have recently read an eye-opening email from Ian Lynch about what happened in the UK with BECTA.

I have received his permission to republish here his thoughts. I think his email speaks volumes about what happened.

Ian Lynch’s email

Fundamentally, I’m not complaining that we were not successful in the tender - I have no idea how strong the winning bid was. I’m complaining that the tender process adopted was broken. This is despite the fact that 130 MPs signed an Early Day Motion in Parliament last year censuring BECTA for procurement frameworks that block out Open Source.

Several governments and councils reported multi-year migration plans to GNU/Linux. Free software activists praised each one of them in their blogs and commentaries. However, a few months or years on, some of those plans crumbled. Vienna is one of them. A question here begs to be answered: why did it happen? The City of Vienna made several crucial mistakes. In this article, I will list the most prominent ones.