Maybe twelve 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 that 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 in 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 use. At 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 Khaled Shulman and colleagues from investigate europe wanted to find out the results are alarming. The di lemma 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 off already in the e. U. From city halls to vehicle registration offices and tax offices in 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. Planned and defined the german off orators are today 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. 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 thats what will happen if its continuous for another ten or twenty years hes already physically how is 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. The servers 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 writing is now secure the data of its citizens it can say how long it will take to implement new functions how expensive their ideas how much they could save and so forth will be less and less able to provide this information. This 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 and ill 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 chemical. Proof of a door what role does microsoft play. We use 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 a factor of 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. 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 those mechanisms 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 a 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 have been 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 and if i get a microsoft monopoly arose thirty five years ago 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. Deezer 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 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. Create spreadsheets and of course create presentations on your own so there has to be a. What do you do with all the documents from other People 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 family or 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 costumer 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 these systems up and running you know we only get paid by about one in every ten thousand users. 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 free of charge that has to go to Good Business it is yes we are growing forty five percent per year for the last night. And for the. 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. 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 the 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 i. T. At the German Interior Ministry how does he justify circumventing e. U. Public procurement law. All the tender dance takes place microsoft doesnt sell its products directly and uses intermediaries who put in bids and compete with one another. This is what that would be like if it were just rationed 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. Experiment. 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 part just a lawyer specializing in anti and public procurement has studied this practice so do 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 they usually know that european law but they will say well even the European Commission itself is doing its. Is the top of the e. U. Are far to breaking its own rules my colleague maria majority from the investigating. Journalist team 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 meet. The sponsors to entice people to get them to sign with microsoft i was already told they are going to start a new contract with microsoft so good luck to both of you to. The. Next. With microsoft. The plan is to go for a negotiated procedure with microsoft for the 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 demand open competition no doubt that are different procedures foreseen by the picture of materials and of course the default procedure is called for tender but then the negotiated procedure is a procedure that exists in their own 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 us huge discounts 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. That 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 the mox 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 and i took became unix mayor 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. Many of us in the c. S. U. Were against that 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 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 one of those was 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 a majority decide in favor thank you. Its to look at is the return of microsoft as payback for the company relocating its german headquarters to munich which is no negotiating 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 a limit system the report did find fault with munichs i. T. Administration but the problem was not with the Lin