Australian Government Agency Moves Towards Linux

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet Australia is reporting that Centrelink, the Australian government agency responsible for distributing social security payments, is investigating Novell's Open Enterprise Server as a method of consolidating huge chunks of its network. Centrelink's national manager is quoted as saying: "We have to look at remote access, virus protection, security. Linux has those capabilities but we have to assure our more senior executives that these boxes have the same level of security and protection as the commercial products""

Comments

probably another "get M$ to lower it's price" ploy

[arfonrg]

I'm sure in the end, M$ will give them big price breaks ad they'll go with windoz.

Am I being to suspicious?

same level of security?

[Anonymous Coward]

... the same level of security and protection as the commercial products
Commercial products = Windows? No, we don't want Linux to have the same level of security and protection, do we?

Hope its for real

[gibbo2]

As an aussie, I'd love to see this happen, but lets hope its serious and not another "pretend" move to Linux to negotiate better prices with their existing vendors.

Normally "existing vendors" is Microsoft, but from the article it seems they're currently using a good non-MS mix of Novell, Lotus, SAP and Oracle on Solaris.

No need for Windows

[_Hellfire_]

Everything Centrelink does is web based anyway. All they need are some mid end desktops running and firefox and they'd be set.

When I dealt with them I was sitting there thinking: Hmmm Internet Explorer under Windows 2000. Fairly expensive and a waste of a software license if you ask me. I also remember thinking that this department would be the ideal place for a large linux rollout simply because they have no need for standard (read: Microsoft centric) apps like word and excel because everything they do is Web server/client based with all the heavy stuff on the backend servers.