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

Hetrogenity

[el_womble]

Let the people choose and support their own software. A hetrogenous network is more secure not less. POP3, IMAP, SMTP, iCal, TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, SAMBA, NFS, XML, CVS, LDAP, OpenDocument, MS-Document etc. These are the technologies that you choose from, not the applications or the OS.

I would prescribe investing in training in both MS and a Linux distribution for the support staff, providing a base install of Ubuntu and the option of installing a Windows if you really can't get on with it. Make sure there is a local wiki with how to connect to various servers and let those that can choose the OS and applications that they feel the most comfortable with. If the new consultant uses FreeBSD / Mac OS X let them connect to your network and connect to the servers using the credentials that the infrastructure guys provide.

Thinking you can protect the network from the inside by locking off features or limiting the OS that you can use is short sighted, it only stops thoese who don't know how to circumvent these measures and thats not who you are trying to stop.

People need to learn to be more afraid of a homogenous network as its the hunting ground of vendor lock-ins and security holes.