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New Zealand Government Open Source with Novell

Posted by samzenpus on from the open-country dept.

quikflik writes "New Zealand Computerworld magazine reports an 'All-of-government' open source deal with Novell. The deal allows government agencies access to Novell Open Source software and support - and probably some other Novell products too considering the Inland Revenue Department have been using them for a while. Still .. is an incumbant vendor always the best? If you were a government, which linux distribution would you choose?"

5 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Why, Debian of course ... by hherb · · Score: 4, Informative

    A government is spending taxpayers money. They should feel obliged to get the biggest band for buck long term. Since most of the costs will probably go into ongoing system maintenance, there is hardly another distribution that can beat the Debian packaging system - especially regarding long term consistency.

    The other benefit not going with a specific commercial distro with their proprietary (even if open!) quirks, but rather with generic Debian is that you will find it easier to get qualified administrators too - that has at least been the experience with our medical centre's IT infrastructure

  2. Re:Going with the devil you know by gtoomey · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nonsense. There are companies that install and maintain Debian specifically for Government like http://togaware.com/

  3. A further note regarding the situation... by tmasky · · Score: 4, Informative

    To my knowledge, there isn't _one_ RedHat partner in New Zealand. Let alone any presence from any other commercial dist.

    Jumping on this, Novell New Zealand has quite successfully been pushing their product and support. Without really any competitor, they're taking over the public and private sector by storm.

    So yeah. No suprise regarding the outcome of preferential Linux vendor choice =)

  4. Re:Going with the devil you know by kuiken · · Score: 4, Informative

    Its not just about debian beeing supported its about the whole platform.
    Oracle wont support any installation on debian
    hardware vendors will offer no support either.

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  5. Criticism by Domstersch · · Score: 4, Informative
    There has already been a fair bit of (poorly researched) criticism of this plan - a good example pointed out to me by the guys at the New Zealand Open Source Society was this article in New Zealand's National Business Review:

    Open source in government: A delusional cheer from the Greens

    Among the more irrational claims made against OS in this article is:
    Even in servers, its strongest point of contention, Linux holds only a very minor share of the market.
    Looks like someone hadn't seen that Netcraft doesn't confirm it (assuming Apache is mostly run on Linux, right?).
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    =w=