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It was not in the article, but let me help you. Swiss bureaucracy is my speciality.
There were two procurements in the past years, where only the minimal amount of data is publicly available. By request, they would release more data, but that’s something that takes multiple weeks. So I can only share what I have found so far.
In those contracts it is not known how many licenses and which licenses were bought. So they will also include Operating Systems (client and server), and expensive licenses such as MSSQL Server. I’m sorry that I cannot share anything more useful right now.
Quite a few developers you can hire to solve your problems and better the world by working on open source software for 25 million a year
This is something I was also always saying. The problem is that they are not allowed to hire freely. There is a limit of how many heads you can hire, due to whatever complex yearly budgeting. So to fulfill the requirements, they are looking for third party providers, which also include support and warranty. Usually this route is more expensive and less flexible. For those public tenders, they are bound by WTO rules. However, in this case, they were able to contract Microsoft freely, which is a huge fucking questionmark. This way you basically shut the door to competition, be it smaller IT companies just reselling Microsoft licenses, or companies able to provide a full set of open source tools including developers for customizations.
Hopefully someone is going to investigate this whole mess.