As someone who had to deal with them from both sides, EU public procurement laws are fucked up beyond repair. There is, however, a simple cure for software that the public sector is avoiding in most places:
1. base the software on an established, battle-tested open source product, there is one for almost any business case
2. use the money to hire an in-house team, hiring norms in public sector at least ALLOW for quality selection, unlike public procurement ones
3. develop in the open, invest into visibility, attract community members
4. shill, try to get as many agencies across your and other member states to pick the same solution and co-develop the software with you, this way the cost drops for everyone
Even if you can't find something to satisfy point 1., the other three points would still work to your benefit. If you can push this for long enough to make the software standard in more places, you could get a critical mass of outside developers to form consultancies you could hire later for additional work.
I know Munich is poster-boy of this not working for desktop OS-es but that's really a consequence of two things:
1. They made all the wrong choices (heavy customization, chasing windows look and feel, not tracking upstream progress)
2. They got elected officials who were effectively Microsoft shills (the top-down decision to go back to Windows was heavily pushed by a single executive who was pissed off he couldn't use Outlook he was used to on his previous drone job).
1. base the software on an established, battle-tested open source product, there is one for almost any business case
2. use the money to hire an in-house team, hiring norms in public sector at least ALLOW for quality selection, unlike public procurement ones
3. develop in the open, invest into visibility, attract community members
4. shill, try to get as many agencies across your and other member states to pick the same solution and co-develop the software with you, this way the cost drops for everyone
Even if you can't find something to satisfy point 1., the other three points would still work to your benefit. If you can push this for long enough to make the software standard in more places, you could get a critical mass of outside developers to form consultancies you could hire later for additional work.
I know Munich is poster-boy of this not working for desktop OS-es but that's really a consequence of two things:
1. They made all the wrong choices (heavy customization, chasing windows look and feel, not tracking upstream progress)
2. They got elected officials who were effectively Microsoft shills (the top-down decision to go back to Windows was heavily pushed by a single executive who was pissed off he couldn't use Outlook he was used to on his previous drone job).