La pubblica amministrazione polacca esclude il software di fornitori diversi da Microsoft negli appalti pubblici

Polish public administration excludes software from vendors other than Microsoft in public tenders, according to a report by the Instrat Foundation. The issue of unequal opportunities points not only to reduced security and resilience, but also to the need for changes in public procurement policy.

For several years, the topic of digital sovereignty has been increasingly discussed in the public sphere, covering not only areas related to artificial intelligence or hardware.

In March, we reported on our pages on the concerns raised by the cloud service providers’ association Polska Chmura regarding updates to the Cloud Computing Cybersecurity Standards. One of the issues was the transfer of data critical to the country outside its jurisdiction.

# One software solution across most of the administration

Meanwhile, the situation in the software sphere does not look any better. The report *“Seemingly Open Procurements”* published by the Instrat Foundation shows that despite a theoretical ban on excluding competition, Polish public administration is in fact dependent on Microsoft office software, including operating systems.

At the same time, tender conditions exclude alternative suppliers that could compete with the American company.

The organization analyzed documentation from 72 public procurement procedures involving office software, initiated between January and November 2025.

Of these, only one—conducted by the Fryderyk Chopin National Institute—did not favor Microsoft in its conditions; the institution included fairly broad options in its operating system requirements, allowing, among others, open-source solutions.

# Conditions compliant with regulations, yet excluding competition

How is Microsoft’s dominance possible if regulations do not allow such practices?

The Foundation points to the requirements: formally, contracting authorities allow submissions of systems or services from other entities. The problem lies in the details—alternative products must meet requirements that primarily align with the American company’s software.

The same requirements recur in procurements from various institutions. Some of them are fully rational and justified. In other cases, however, there is a strong suspicion that they are included for the same reason: the contracting authority wants to avoid receiving software from any other manufacturer, so it specifies unique characteristics of Microsoft software, even though requiring them has little practical justification.

(*Instrat Foundation report “Seemingly Open Procurements”*)

Among the functions unique to the creators of the Windows system listed in tenders were:

* compatibility with Active Directory, a Microsoft solution for managing access and licenses for user accounts of other company products. This condition eliminates, for example, LibreOffice;
* inclusion of all programs within a single package—if the office suite in the procedure must also include an email client, this excludes alternatives such as LibreOffice and Thunderbird, which come from different vendors;
* interface compatibility—requirements include the availability of functions under the same names as in Microsoft software, or a user interface operating “in graphical mode with 3D elements.”

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Though to be fair everything running on the same software is a good thing it definitely creates less technical difficulties and allows for smoother operations.

So your 2 options for a software contract bid are Microsoft and Microsoft with a fake mustach?

~~Microsoft Office~~ Microsoft Copilot

Not a long time ago they’ve wanted to use Google’s cloud storage to keep government data such as state healthcare information, in exchange for a **HUGE** :^) investment by Google of 5 million dollars for training over the next 5 years. Developing our own government cloud system to keep data secure has been brushed off as waste of money because such services were already developed and can be bought from private companies (such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon).

At least it wasn’t Huawei – which was considered in 2024 by a then candidate for Vice Minister of Digital Affairs MP Radosław Lubczyk who was caught passing parlimentary questions written by Huawei lobbyists.

[Yeah the government is ran by lobbyists.]

Developing your own solutions/open source has one main downside: its cheap.