Sun Gets Open Source Into NSW Government

lplatypus writes "ZDNet Australia reports that Sun Microsystems has "has cleared a place for its Java Enterprise System on the NSW government's software shelf, continuing its campaign to weaken Microsoft's monopoly over the desktop." The Age clarifies that Sun's offering includes open source components such as Linux, Gnome, Mozilla and Evolution. Another article is at Australian IT, or see Sun's press release."

Comments

Re:hmm mostly good... but

[Shakrai]

Yes, that is a huge stumbling block to implementing anything other then Windows at any given company. Everything has hooks into Word/Excel/Outlook-MAPI/ etc. There's just nothing you can do about it right now. There aren't any comparable apps on the other side of the fence yet. Yet. I, too, hope for change in that area.

Exactly. If Sun approached us with this solution I would say something like, "It looks real nice. Come back to us when you have convinced our vendors to rewrite their systems around it"

The really sad thing is that our solution would be much better engineered in Oracle (or even mySQL for peats sake...) as opposed to M$SQL They could even keep the Windows clients if they so desired (though I'd be just as happy to see them gone with the amount of money we pay MS each year).

I think the eventual way to fix this is to convince the vendors in question to look at other solutions is that they will save themselves (and their clients) money by using Linux/Unix based solutions (and to top it off the products would be more stable and secure) Since everything revolves around the bottom line, I don't see any better way of getting them to change.

Thoughts?

No, but you should see most of the improvements

[donscarletti]

Madhatter won't be free.

However Madhatter is largely based on GPLed software. GPL is (despite our BSD loving friends' statements to the contrary) an assurance that pretty much all of Madhatter will be free and "the rest of us" therefore will be able to enjoy any contribution that Sun Makes to Gnome or mozilla.

And it of course goes without saying that we will be able to enjoy the advancements in java that will occur when Sun integrates it more with the Linux desktop. (including the usage of GTK in java's UI allowing java programs to work better with GTK programs and even slightly better with QT based programs.