At the end of 2011 FSFE started monitoring all IT related public procurement notices in Finland, searching of violations of the procurement law, specifically cases where the procurement notices ask for a specific brand or product, thus discriminating free competition.

The most common example would be a government or municipality office seeking to renew their Microsoft licences, and therefore release a call for tenders for Microsoft licenses, effectively restricting tenderers to Microsoft resellers, discriminating any other operating system vendors.

Publishing calls for tenders that restrict the offering to a specific brand or product is illegal in all of the EU countries. With these actions FSFE seeks to develop an EU-wide procurement monitoring effort, that will eventually lead to free competition, and as Free Software is superior in most cases, it will lead to significant increase in Free Software usage in the public sector.

In this talk the team coordinator Otto Kekäläinen will tell about the efforts motivations, the latest news about how the effort is going on and what impact it has had. PR about the effort: http://fsfe.org/news/2012/news-20120619-01