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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?"
debian :)
I'm sure it's a pure coincidence that this coincides with the release of Novell SUSE Linux 10.0.
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
There is a lot to be said for sticking with your current vendor and infrastructure. First, the cost of switching is a huge factor when making a platform switch. If it were a piece of cake, then sure, go with the vendor that gives you the most bang for your buck, but real life is hardly like that.
Going with what you know is always a better solution than going with an unknown. The key, of course, is planning. Whatever you do, the goal of all your short term actions should guide you towards your long term goals.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
that's what public universities are for.
put the students and the faculty working in the distro. create tech support incubator companies.
gives a boost to the local industry, trains new ppl, brings new ideas, tailor the software according to local needs/culture, keeps the money in the country...
What ? Me, worry ?
Gee, this won't start flame wars. :P But in any case, I might personally choose Mandriva Linux, since they are a very non-proprietary Linux vendor who's practices jive well with the spirit of the GPL. Mandriva is definately one of the most desktop-ready distros out there, strikes a good balance between the stability and freshness of packages, and has a huge amount of community-contributed software available for it. It's also a good distro to ease ex-Windows users and admins into, as it has a great many powerful GUI tools.
Of course, there's always a 100% community distro like Debian, or if they had the resources they could even roll their own in-house distro. That would certainly ensure a custom fit, wouldn't it? Of course, since they're going OSS, there's nothing saying they can't go that route later down the road.
-AT
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
This is an example where Novell is good for Linux. It's much easier for a government to "stick with Novell" than "jump to open source". It sounds safer somehow even if the end result is the same for Linux.
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.
Translation :
:P
[australian that think it's the kiwis with the funny accent]
foish and chups eh gill
[kiwi]
you mean fish and chips ay girl?
or as you would say it, feeesh and cheeps aaaay geerl
while we're on subject of australia
what happened with the ashes
or the tri nations
and oooooo, the netball
or, getting pwned by being america's little baby boy country
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
Since there are no licenses, OpenSource is much sheeper.
Could be a smart move. I guess the CEO of Novell will shortly be needing to flee to somewhere a long way away after his "investors" have finished with him.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
I'm not "a government" but instead work for one.
When we buy general-purpose servers, we go for reasonable quality, good hardware replacement support services, and distribution-hardware compatibility partnerships, such as the Red Hat - HP one.
The question "what is it we really need to provide" which ultimately leads to "which distribution should we use" is not a trivial one. However, the one surefire way to botch things up is to put "we should use X" question before the "what do we want" question.
A general tone in the government IT is that a push towards Linux is good around the board for us customers because it changes the market landscape back to normal after Microsoft has tipped it over for a while. "Horses for courses" is a tried and tested way for humans to work together, and malignant monopolies can prevent and have prevented us from working together.
However, what we're really waiting for is for the established actors in the Linux market, such as Red Hat and Novell, to bring out real corporate desktop products with all associated support services. I'm not talking about the current workstation products, but instead of locked-down, managed desktop environments WITH the fringe benefit of X11, which means that we can add local applications on local application servers without having to install them on the desktops, and benefit from a more headquaters-controlled but still locally fixable environment.
We're seeing the Red Hat Network product being worked on, and ultimately the openness of Linux architecture will be a huge boon for citizen activists who can add efficiency to government directly by fixing software applications and creating better ones.
Vehicle registration software working slowly? You can fix it directly by optimizing the GUI libraries.
At home and in my office I run SuSE linux. I can adapt it to run any application stable to perform the business needs and also it can be adapted to virtually any working environment. Also, the user interface is very friendly with Yast but I think that the true distro that would excel the others is the one that will provide large deployments with the support for their users while they learn the new software and help them work the software into their existing operations, which from the article, Novell seems to provide pretty well.
Bryan
Simple look at the needs of the Organization and choose a mixture:
1. OpenBSD for the Bastion Side, Firewalls, IDS, Routers.
2. Linux for File Shares, DB's and apps. {Suse, Redhat}
3. Client Side: Xandros, knoptics
Each item would be rated against a check list of items.
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.
Got a question about UNIX ask it here : Unix/xBSD Forum
Don't you just *love* interstate rivalry...
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 =)
oh god, it's a new zealander.... why the fuck do they always have a fucking chip on their sholder, shit he's looking this way... turn around or something... i don't fucking know maybe if we ignore him he'll go away and not inform us about his fabulous country and their 'many' sporting/scientific/cultural superiorities over Australia... which is an inferior country in every way...
oh fuck he's commming!
I'd choose the one with the biggest company backing it, because that's what governments tend to do, and well, surprise, surprise, what did New Zealand do?
International! International! :(
Karma: Oldschool
New Zealand refused to have the wool pulled over their eyes by Microsoft's sheared source initiative. And it wasn't a matter of knit-picking: closed source is baadly restrictive and, between ewe and me, good for mutton in the quality department. Butt enough rambling.
Open source in government: A delusional cheer from the Greens
Among the more irrational claims made against OS in this article is:Looks like someone hadn't seen that Netcraft doesn't confirm it (assuming Apache is mostly run on Linux, right?).
=w=
It may not be as simple as selecting one single vendor, but I'd be inclined to deal with the problem in the following way. For a start, choose something that's supported by more than one vendor. You're pretty much obliged to do this to avoid vendor lock-in, right? And we want to avoid that. So, given that it's available from more than one viable vendor, choose two vendors and give your subordinates the leeway to select one or the other on a case by case basis. That way your suppliers keep each other on their toes, rather than resting on the fact that switching vendors is going to cause you more hassle than it's worth. A federal government is going to be sufficiently large that they don't have to offer an exclusive contract to attract tenders. Well, maybe not New Zealand, but most federal governments.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
"The Greens in New Zealand who advocate the use of OSS are upset about a Novell contract because it doesn't support open source. The article mentions the greens spokeperson saying the contract "cleared the path for government agencies to adopt and expand their use of non-proprietary software" -- failing to note that Novell is a company offering proprietary versions of OSS."
at least we don't want to ban DHMO
I only skimmed the site you linked, but can someone explain to me why a particular OS having a small market share should in itself have anything to do with whether or not you choose it?
Factors like interoperability, scalability, security, performance, and support are important. Things like the raw number, or percentage, of people using a given product should be completely irrelevant to whether or not the product is chosen.
As a government, or pretty much anybody with a lot to loose, you'd want to go with a distribution that...
A) Can give support when you need it.
B) Can reasonably guarantee that it will do so for the next decade.
This pretty much leaves just Red Hat and Novell.
From then on it's probably a matter of weighing benefits vs. price during negotiations.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Apparently it's so blindingly obvious that Debian is the right choice that it's redundant by default.
No France
It's good for open source, it's good for Novell and it's good for the New Zealand government. After all, open source software may not come with any licensing fees, but somebody still has to install it, make sure it all works as expected and maintain it for you afterwards. Also, a lot of people had their doubts as to whether Novell's new open source business plan was going to work. Hell, I used to be a CNE and just a short while ago I thought M$ had pretty much succeeded in making the company irrelevant. Now it looks like I may have been wrong about that. You think maybe it'd be smart to start studying for some of their exams again? Just to add some color to your CV, of course. ;-)
Red Hat's administration software is probably superior to Novell's, and I find SuSE lacking in some areas, but regardless... if Novell keeps performing how they have been for the past 3 to 5 quarters, in say 5 years there will be no more Novell. Novell is a highly mismanaged company, literally riddled with problems. The investors of Novell are pretty much demanding a revamp in management and there has been speculation that a bigger fish might wind up just buying Novell.
If Novell finds that linux isn't making the money its supposed to be, they'll sell off the Suse division and move into the next big tech area like they've done so many times before. In case you haven't noticed, not much has gotten better in SuSE since Novell bought it, they are still riding out the benefits from the previous owners (with the exception of a few things Nat has worked on). This is probably one of the reasons that (according to netcraft) Fedora overtook the number of SuSE servers in only a little over a year or so and now is only rivaled by Debian and its bigger brother RHEL (just in case you were wondering, desptie the increase of Fedora use, there was not a symmetric decrease from RHEL, i.e. it wasn't just people switching from RHEL to Fedora).
Anyway, moral of the story is that they are buying OSS from a financially unstable company likely to make a rash decision in the near future, which will only lead to a larger perception that OSS companies are fragmented and can't support their products, or some other nonsense for the MS FUD machine.
Regards,
Steve
they[new zealand IRS] have been using more intelligent choices for their work than others.
That is because that is the moneymaking side of gouvernment. On the spending side it doesn't matter much how dumb you are, you can spend the money anyhow.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
What distro? The one you can get best LOCAL support for. Why send off tax dollars to some MegaCorp in the US if you can create LOCAL jobs and support LOCAL companies?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Of course Gentoo! Because everyone knows that production servers need to run really fast. You don't get that with generic binaries.
I'd roll my own and then convince the government to pay me a gigantic support contract.
Then when they have problems with openoffice or mozilla, i'd tell them to go complain to the project developers.
Ben
There is obviously a trend towards open source platforms and away from proprietary platforms. On that we can probably all agree. The question I have is, what happens next? Assume 2 or 3 Linux distributions end up becoming widespread and dominant. Assume Windows becomes just one of many rather than being ubiquitous. Let's think outside the box and assume that even Apple ekes out more than a 3% share of the desktop. What is the impact of this on application developers? Sure, the "generic" apps like those found in the various Office products will continue to evolve, copy each other, exchange data with each other, and be the primary application most people use in their jobs. But what about the specialty applications: audio/video editing, medical and scientific applications, airline reservation systems, tax preparation software, web content creation, etc, etc? Do "best-in-class" applications emerge for each of these niches - tied to a single platform? Does the whole world switch to open source so the platform doesn't matter? My big fear is we end up like it was in the 1970's all over again where you are forced to choose a platform to get the particular application you need. And if you need multiple applications, you end up supporting multiple platforms. Yes, standards that address interoperability can help in this regard, but if you want best-in-class you will not have much choice, and we all know that supporting multiple platforms is more work than supporting one.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I'd have the IT department put together a distrobution based on Gentoo.
This would allow the IT department to have an exact idea of what is in the system and exactly how it's going to work.
This would require the IT staff to have the expertise to properly support this setup without external support. But most governments should already have such resources.
- Jesse McNelis
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Say what you will, taunt us even, but we will never forget The Incident!
I would advise providing a local distfiles mirror though - several thousand govt machines running 'emerge -uD world' would totally clobber NZ's little pipe.
this is great news we need more victories like this. I don't care what distribution they chose as along as it isn't Microsoft.
now they will be kicking themselves for not doing it sooner. we need to stop this distribution fighting. I chose Ubuntu personally but I personally find it very hard to chose because there are so many that are high quality.
when something like this happens we all win.
cross platform development tools and web apps.
People who make applications like the ones you describe like to use those where possible to maximize the potential users of the software they create.
It's all very well saying "they should use debian" or "OMG LFS!!!"
As an IT contractor I've worked inside government, and the culture is very different compared to the commercial world. Government jobs are jobs for life. There is nothing that encourages the learning of new skills, and the only real way to lose your job is through misconduct or negligence. Thus the over-riding concern is about not taking responsibility for anything, and the path known is always better than the unknown. There is no grass-roots techs to push change from the bottom-up, that's risky. Change only comes from the top down, and we all know the top tends to listen to M$.
The only thing that pushes governments towards open source is cost, big IT budgets make bad headlines: "that money could have paid for X number of teachers/doctors/etc"
Due to being public bodies most governments have strict rules on who they buy services from (and usually for good reason) have to be ISO9000 approved, and all that jazz. This usually precludes using anyone but the really big suppilers who can afford such things. This also covers the government, as if it all goes www.titsup.com then they can blame the supplier, and have some tangible "proof" that it was a reasonable choice. Plus there is someone to sue if something really nasty happens.
The fact that it's being chosen at all is a miricle, so be happy, rejoice! These customised Linux provider/support companies are the only way the penguin is going to see high level public service.
I would choose Debian, hands down... When you go with a corporate-branded distro, you have the potential for vender lock-in. Look at Red Hat - many organizations which depended on its free distribution (which ended with Red Hat 9) now have to pony up large sums of money to get its RHEL or are forced to go with the fairly buggy and IMHO unstable Fedora.
Debian's stable, community-supported, free as in beer AND in free speech, and won't be going away any time soon. Some complain about Debian's slow release process, but in an organization with hundreds of PCs you don't want to be forced to upgrade each of them every year or so in order to continue receiving security updates.
Does this mean that it's GNU/Zealand now?
[ducks]
This
Quite frankly, people buy computers to solve problems. You don't necessarily want to run a payroll application, you just want to issue checks faster and less expensively than having clerks do so manually. The software is the means to provide the solution, and the O/S and computer are the platform needed to deliver it. Even if the solution can only be done using a computer, the computer is not the solution, the computer and underlying platforms are the vehicle to deliver the solution.
For example from over ten years ago, if your 'problem' is to be able to play DOOM, your means necessary (the 'vehicle') to provide the solution is an IBM Compatible (nothing from Apple would cut it) at least a 386 (because a 286 is inadequate to run the game) and at least 4 meg of memory. Being able to play the game is the solution; the software, the OS and the hardware is, and always has been, simply is the means in this case, the vehicle used to deliver that solution. Now there are clone versions of Doom (and other First-person shooters) available, one can use other software to solve the problem of getting that experience. But the computer and software were simply the means to solve the problem, they were not the solution itself except to the extent they are the only possible means to solve the problem.
Complaining that the particular software wanted dictates hardware or underlying OS purchases comes about 20 years too late. It also applies to development of applications; the most popular operating systems get the vast majority of development. The roads of the software world are littered with the bones of the corpses of dead companies that bet on OS/2 as a platform and died with the mirage it ended up becoming when IBM's lack of marketing and Windows 95 killed it.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
If I were the prime minister I would pay a company to train a group of GNU/Linux and BSD system administrators. Then I would hire them and install Debian GNU/Linux on all client machines and OpenBSD on all servers. I would also consider offering tax cuts for private businesses and individuals using GNU/Linux or BSD, because this would help this country to fight unstable PCs and virii.
New Zealand is tied for second place with Finland in Transparency International's (TI) 2005 corruption index (they are tied as the least corrupt cuntries)
Coincidence? I think not!
I work in IT for the government (US), and we chose Red Hat. At the time it was a no brainer, there wasn't really another enterprise (in terms of support) vendor at the time. These days it's a bit different, but I think we'd make the same decision again. The one time we've needed support, it was handled very promptly and very well. We used to be a Novell shop, and in our environment that's one strike against SUSE even before it had an evaluation on technical merits.
Yoper, its from New Zealand and it is, supposedly, the fastest linux distro.
MS-Linux, of course :-)
What all the folks touting Debian fail to understand is that Novell has done a TON of work getting Linux to play well at all levels of the enterprise. They have the Novell Linux Desktop (Ximian) as a supportable, maintainable desktop platform with red carpet (or whatever it's currently called) for management, they have SLES9 as an App server which is 100% supported by Oracle and others, they have the OES version (Open Enterprise Server) with eDirectory integration and all the identity manageement tools that go with it, and they support it all with a 24/7 call center.
If you were a Government that already had a releationship with Novell, and you were looking for a smooth transition path to Linux, why on earth wouldn't you stay with them?
If you were any company looking to transition to Linux, why wouldn't you look at them?
No, I don't work for them, but I do work for a school district that is at the same phase of transition.
A couple weeks ago, my dad tossed me a Ubuntu LiveCD, and said to try it. Another LiveCD? *yawn* It sat on my desk until I decided I needed some old files off of a hybrid ext3/HFS+ disk. Popped the CD into my laptop, plugged the USB drive in, and... WOW! I was expecting something like Knoppix, you know, the whole k- orgy, etc... I was pleasantly surprised to see that it booted into Gnome, and my disk automounted on the desktop. The whole layout was clean, no k- or g- crap everywhere. I used the built-in connect-to-server function, and did SFTP like it was a mounted volume. Awesome!
I still spend most of my day in OpenBSD/fluxbox, but I think I might give Ubuntu a try. It impressed the hell out of me. I am certainly going to recommend it to people who ask me about an easy-to-use linux.
http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/
They are both full of comedy and farce, perhaps one is unintentional but is full of it none the less.
>>If you were a government, which linux distribution would you choose?" Answer: Novell. Because the company has been around for decades with no sign of going anywhere. Xandros while an excellent distro is still new in this arena and as such would be unwise.
Hmmm... Australia, New Zealand?
I wasn't aware that there was such a rivalry among Canadian provinces.
Which of them is where they talk French?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Novell is a good choice because in addition to service they offer some awesome add ons like eDirectory, Ifolder and groupwise. I noticed they open sourced a "light" version of ifolder too, good for them.
They have a really impressive stack now.
evil is as evil does
Competency in Government? Thou doust jest surely.
The MyTh - I am a figment of the Imagination - [Im Probably even not here]