New Zealand Government Open Source with Novell

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?"

Comments

If I were a government...

[FluffyPanda]

If I were a government looking for a software platform I would most definately choose Novell. You get the level of support that you need with the advantage that you are getting an open platform on which to work. If you have trouble with your Novell linux you can easily get Redhat in to take over, bring in consultants to help out or even set up a department to do it yourself.

But we all know that, right? Is anyone on Slashdot actually thinking that choosing SLES over, say RHEL or (god forbid) a custom Gentoo approach is a bad decision?

My personal opinion is that Novell / SuSE is a better approach than RedHat since Novell has a better desktop product (actually, a better range of desktop offerings) to go along with its server software.

Redhat is not the one

[harryoyster]

Having been working in an Redhat enterprise linux environment for so many years we have recently began to shift all servers over to novel. Since that time we have had less issues and the overall support from novel has been awesome to say the least. PLUS in our case it costs significantly less than the same Redhat licensing fees (redhat network etc). We have also several slackware and debian boxes doing other things. Go Novel, Say no to redhat.