May the twelfth twenty seventeen overnight a dangerous computer virus spread around the globe one a crime was the name cyber criminals gave to the trojan which they used to blackmail their victims and encrypt their Computer Data the ransom between three hundred and six hundred dollars to be paid into an anonymous bitcoin account more than two hundred thousand computers on all continents were affected by this attack from the German Railway to the ministry of the interior and russia and the japanese car manufacturer a honda. In britain some hospitals even had to implement their emergency plan how could a single piece of malware similar taney asli Cripple Companies hospitals and even Intelligence Services all over the wild the answer involves microsoft all the victims. Used the same software they were all vulnerable in the same way and they all relied on a Single Company namely microsoft the same applies to every state administration in europe. Whats the impact of this dependence journalist Howard Schumann and colleagues from investigate europe wanted to find out the results are alarming. The dial emma affects the data belonging to all of us and out of pendants on microsoft goes far deeper than just our use of word or excel software almost every governmental and public or farting in the e. U. From city halls to vehicle registration offices and tax office is software that 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. And the fact 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. Which employees are all trained to use microsoft programs because bonding servers also run with Microsoft Software so of course theres also results in economic dependence to hide things thats what will happen if this continues for another ten or twenty years its already for the my personal concern is that the dependency of various manufacturers of the. And the virtualization of our entire i. T. System meaning the relocation of i. T. Systems into the cloud into some distance. The servers that could be anywhere which would mean our governments ability to control and manage its own i. T. Is constantly diminishing. In that sense our public agencies are no longer able to determine how secure their id 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 the 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 and 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 on our show you one of our cooling rooms where the computers are camped. You can see them working away on both sides and theres enclosed spaces cant go. Through this at the door what role does microsoft play. Both proprietary and open Source Software in some areas proprietary software is used almost exclusively that includes as a pay for example also proprietary software but of course microsoft has used a lot of people used to working with it and it has an almost day facto monopoly position. We know that we have to reduce our dependency and use various strategies to minimize this dependency 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. Microsoft microsoft is indeed a real challenge its not only public agencies that use microsoft products but also industry 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. 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. I know 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 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 then all of a sudden people realized hey it does work its the same with software. Why such resistance from the authorities. If i get a microsoft monopoly arose thirty five years ago when an entire industry has developed around it and many people are. Vested 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 as the. Modern 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 its Pretty Simple heres the email program and then we have an address book thats 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 text create spreadsheets and of course create presentations on your own so there has to be a. What do you deal with all the documents from other people that public agencies constantly have multiple people working on a single document then the boss has decided theres a lengthy workload you cant handle that can you. Show your carrier 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 mail program or calendar youre already using our system you know what 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 along the line but theyre very big and we earn enough from them that we can provide our services to the other ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of free of charge which are. Not a 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 the 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. Contract 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 bart 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 what would be like if it were to straighten it 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. Meant for. The units of pilot every state administration puts out a call for tender in accordance with the framework contract we need new microsoft licenses who can give us the best deal. That may often be the case yes but not necessarily in every case. Its not that simple e. U. 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 flat. At the university of groningen in the netherlands pumps a lawyer specializing in i. T. And public procurement has studied this practice so to Framework Agreements with microsoft violate e. U. Law. Yet. Theres very clear it violates european law and when you ask organizations you know why are you doing this the people responsible for attending they usually notice that file its european law but they will say well even the European Commission itself is doing its. Best to tom petty you will far exceed breaking its own rules my colleague maria majority from the investigator europe Journalist Team has been a long time correspondent in brussels and knows who to ask. Ok who are we going to meet now and now we are going to need a leg. Im thinking type of event but michel i was already told they are going to advance a new contract with michael for next year so good luck to you to the. Next. Microsoft and i you or i be negotiating a new contract the plan is to go for negotiating procedure with microsoft for the best top layer. And for call for tender with a reseller. For microsoft doesnt the practice to negotiate this framework contract violate the rules of procurement which demand open competition not that are there are different procedures foreseen by the picture and rules and of course the data for that procedure is called for tender but then the negotiated procedure is a procedure that exists in the rules 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 did do call for tender in open court 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 a 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 optimal situation because they are so dependent on working with microsoft that they are even thinking that they cant function without the Microsoft Software it says 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 of the procurement law describes. Social 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. Decided the City Administration would switch from Microsoft Windows to the open source Linux Operating System the project called the mocks was considered a Great Success and was also copied in other european cities. In twenty twelve details writer who was the citys Economic Advisor at the time negotiated an agreement with microsoft to relocate its german headquarters to munich. In twenty fourteen i took a munichs mayor and since then the social democratic mayor has joined forces with the conservatives on the city council to bring the munich administration back into the microsoft fold. Because many of us in the c. S. U. Were against the decision back then. It was a decision based purely on. Cost far more than one hundred million a monopolist always wants to make sure it gets all the 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 you negotiate a few years ago. No it certainly is not what i initiated and what we have voted for todays to improve our i. T. Modernize it and make it more effective and reliable for users in the administration and for our citizens. However a report showed that a large majority of City Employees were happy with the limo system the report did find fault with munichs i. T. Administration but the problem was not wit