State Administration Minister Nikolai Vasilev opened on December 3 the conference Proposals for open source systems for State Administration by saying that the state's existing contracts with Microsoft were "profitable".

The conference was organised by the State Administration and Administrative Reform Ministry and the Foundation Applied Research and Communication, a Ministry media statement said.

The goal of the forum was to discus possibilities open source software solutions could offer to state administration, the media statement said.

At the opening of the forum, Vasilev said that the contract signed with Microsoft in 2002 had helped to get Bulgaria off the black-lists of intellectual property violators. Besides this, the contract had been profitable according to Vasilev, as it was in dollars and the exchange rate of the dollar had drastically dropped, compared to 2002. "Our country now pays around three times less in leva, compared to five and a half years ago," Vasilev said as quoted by Focus news agency.

Vasilev questioned how free free software really was because no one had calculated the costs of implementation of the software in all ministries.

Vassilev added that, if Bulgaria would sign a new contract with Microsoft, this would secure that it would receive the latest version of all of the company's software until 2011.

According to Vassilev, even if the contract would not be renewed in 2011, product versions of 2011 would be sufficient for several years after that.

Speakers at the conference included Plamen Vatchkov, State agency for information technology, Todor Yalumov, Foundation Applied Research and Communication, Slavcho Manolov, Centre for information, communication and management software at the Council of Ministers and UNDP, Marc Lange, Microsoft, Yovko Lambrev, IBM Bulgaria, Veselin Yankov, Novell, as well as representatives of several software and hardware consultancy companies.