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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 :)
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.
SUE Linux? Is that a distribution specifically tailored for lawyers?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
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
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 =)
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?
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."
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.
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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
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.
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.
Does this mean that it's GNU/Zealand now?
[ducks]
This