Relevant link to OSOR: RO: Proprietary licence deal draws ire open source proponents

OSOR - the "Open Source Observatory and Repository Europe", initated and hosted by the European Commission, provides the information that

"The Romanian government announced its renewal of a framework software licence with Microsoft in the middle of May. The framework licence deal is worth 100 million euro in software licences to be used by government agencies between 2010 and 2012. Romania will also pay the software giant another 58 million euro this fall, as the final payment for the 2004 - 2009 framework licence agreement that expired last month."

Please see the full article on the OSOR website titled "RO: Proprietary licence deal draws ire open source proponents."

For those who would like to compare these figures to some figures of the overall Romanian government budget some figures are listed here: http://www.seeurope.net/?q=node/17061 (Please note that the conversion rate for EUR : RON is about 1:4).

You could, for instance, see from these figures that 100 mln Euros for proprietary software is equal to about 25% of the total budget that Romania has available for Research (1700 mln RON which equals about 425 mln EUR). Interesting, isn't it.