Liko, There is nothing wrong with the Law. It only needs to be followed. It actually has very good intentions of making sure that all (technology) suppliers get an equal opportunity to tender for a whatever it is. Mind you, once the tenders have been received and opened, the client is under no obligation to buy from anyone, not even the lowest price. Our argument is this; say a ministry wants to buy a SQL DB Server. They advertise this without mentioning MS SQL Server anywhere (that's what the law says). You quote your SQL Server at KSh 5.6m (you are a MS Gold Partner), and I quote my Open Source SQL server at 0.5m (I am only selling my services and not licenses). The tendering committee now has two options and the guys in IT can defend their choice of technology, and the TCO that goes with it, all the way from having to buy upgrade licenses a year later or so. Then the decision is made. At this point, nobody can come and tell them that they must buy this or that, its their decision. Important thing is that the management has seen all the options available. If this law is broken in your favour, I don't expect you to have a problem with it. You are happy. No? It is this that will raise management questions about the cost of license upgrades vis a vis the cost of migrating to FOSS products. A Ministry would save more by migrating to Scalix than upgrading to MS Exchange in the long term. But how does the accounting officer get to know this if the IT guy only requests a particular brand name, leaving out everyone else? For public institutions that are running on our taxes, we want to know that they are spending money prudently. They cant be given a blank cheque. -- Evans Ikua Linux Professional Association of Kenya Tel: +254-20-2250381, Cell: +254-722 955 831 Eagle House, 2nd Floor Kimathi Street, Opp. Corner House www.lpakenya.org Quoting Liko Agosta <likoa@verviant.com>:
Evans,
That law should be changed :)
If a government agency has already invested in some technology stack, they should have the right to say they want a solution that ran's on that technology stack ....lets says Microsoft SQL Server ..
Why ... The license for SQL server will be a sunk cost at that point and getting different technology is making a bigger financial commitment and raising project risk .... also .. if the customers programmers/admins know C# and SQL Server or Websphere and DB2, the client has the right to pick that platform ...
We have ran into this with our clients. Whenever we are doing project discovery, we will find out which technologies they currently have/support ... if a client has SQL Server, we will typical ask for usage reports for that SQL server box and in most cases, we have been able to save money by "adding to" their existing infrastructure ... or tuning their existing infrastructure to take more load.
Many organizations we have worked with tend to buy a servers/software licenses for each project ... we advice against this and are usually for consolidation and better management. That way a 4 CPU license for SQL Server Enterprise Edition (approx USD 80,000) will be apportioned to the 20 systems or projects that will use a well tuned 4CPU SQL server ....
So .. good intentions... bad law ... why enforce or spend time on it
My 2 cents
Liko Agosta, CEO Verviant Consulting Services.
www.verviant.com Phone : 1-919-341-1820 Fax : 1-978-268-8403 Toll Free: 1-866-551-4935 Pager: 9193891551@txt.att.net
-----Original Message----- From: kictanet-bounces+likoa=verviant.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+likoa=verviant.com@lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of Evans Ikua Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 1:34 PM To: Liko Agosta Cc: kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke Subject: [kictanet] Software procurement in kenya
Interesting what Google can come up with:
http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2008/052308-kenya-linux-group-challenges-proc urement.html?fsrc=rss-linux-news
We finally got to meet with the PPOA on Friday, 5th September. We had a very fruitful discussion on the Public Procurement and Disposal Act 2005, whose provisions are being ignored by Government procurement agents:
https://ict-innovation.fossfa.net/taxonomy/blog-tags/kenya
This good law stipulates that procuring agents should not mention any trade marks, companies or product names when requesting for quotations. They are required to just give the specs of what they need to accomplish. But how many times do we see these RFQs with brand names such as Microsoft *?. This has got to stop and nobody has any excuse to break the law with impunity.
We will be putting details of the proceedings on our website soon, and also in the media.
-- Evans Ikua Linux Professional Association of Kenya Tel: +254-20-2250381, Cell: +254-722 955 831 Eagle House, 2nd Floor Kimathi Street, Opp. Corner House www.lpakenya.org
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