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SUSE Awarded EAL4 Certification
An anonymous reader writes "Following in the wake of its previous certifications, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 has achieved EAL4 certification on 'an IBM eServer.' This puts SLES9 in the same league as Windows 2000 for sales in the government sector and is the first Linux distro to achieve an EAL4 certification."
That, my friend, is probably the most succinct description of what is wrong with the world of personal computing that I've heard yet.
The only thing I would add is that this applies all across the board. Home users and corporate office users are in the same boat: they often have no interesting in "upgrading" to get more whiz-bang because they don't need it and don't want the headaches. That's the essentially conservative attitude that the bulk of users have, because any significant change means they may have to spend time and money they don't have to learn something new, deal with problems that weren't there before, and may find their shiny new OS and apps interfering with getting their jobs done. Microsoft's feature-oriented marketing and forced upgrade cycles have probably caused more lost man-hours than the common cold.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The French Ministry of Defense will put up 7 million over the next three years to fund an industrial consortium building a Linux-based operating system that can achieve EAL5 certification. The coalition includes Bertin Technologies, SURLOG, Jaluna, Mandrakesoft, and OPPIDA.
BTW. There are Server and Embedded Linux version that has achieved Telecom Carrier Grade certification for reliablity. Microsoft won't try to get Telecom Carrier Grade certification for Windows because it is too unreliable.