Slashdot Mirror
Novell Signs Linux Deal with Australian Government
truthsearch writes to tell us ITWire is reporting that Novell has just signed a deal with the Australian government to become an approved supplier of Open Source software and solutions. This deal, believed to be the first of it's kind, "places Novell on the NSW government panel of preferred open source suppliers. This is the first panel contract of its kind by an Australian jurisdiction that contains provisions specific to open source software, giving government agencies and departments formal access to Linux solutions."
As much as I like to think that my state is a little more important than the others, it's pretty obvious from the title of TFA that the deal has been signed with the New South Wales state government, not the Australian federal government.
The article clearly states that the contract is with the New South Wales State Government. So this covers New South Wales only, not the entire country, as the slashdot title indicates.
Also, just because Novell is now an approved supplier doesn't mean that NSW State Government can't implement non-Novell solutions, or purchase OSS (solutions) from anyone other than Novell. AFAIK, it merely means that some paperwork can be skipped in the procurement process. For instance, I think that when dealing with a non-approved supplier, evidence of comparative offerings from at least 2 other suppliers is also required. At least, that is what it would mean in a Federal Government context.
A panel contract means that the supplier can be used to "purchase" software without having to go through a formal tender process or get a waiver. The contract sets pricing and levels of service expectations.
PCs have been purchased on panel contracts for at least 20 years. You don't want to have to go to tender to buy a single, or a handful, of PCs - even if it weren't expensive for all concerned you would have people twiddling thumbs for months until their PCs arrived. Nor would you want to do large numbers of such purchases with waivers, with the invitations to corruption that would create.
So this really is quite a big deal.
Of course, any group that has sufficient compute savvy to do their own support will still be able to download and do their own support. They quite likely also have the level of expertise and size of project to purchase software via tender.
Its the small non-technical groups that would make small purchases using panel contracts that benefit from this - a high barrier for them to adopting Linux solutions has been removed.
Squirrel!
If you can suggest an Open Source application that cleanly supports an interface with Document Management Systems, such as ODMA, I'd be very interested.
I work in a (non-US) government department, and we're required by law to keep all documents for certain amounts of time ... the exact amount of which depends on the type of document. We also have some legal requierments to protect certain types of documents from some employees. (eg. If two branches of the department are supposed to be providing independent advice on the same topic from different perspectives, we need to be able to demonstrate they haven't been reading each other's work.) This sort of thing is also often very important for law firms.
We do this by educating staff to save documents into a Document Managenent System (we currently use Interwoven's Worksite but aren't locked into it), which requires them to enter some extra metadata about what the document is, and helps to centralise the whole document management thing immensely.
I use OSS at home for my own things all the time, and at home I've gone without Microsoft products at all for at least 2 years, but last time I looked at the main Office tools (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc), I couldn't find any reliable support for ODMA. To be fair, Microsoft Office also has hopeless half-done support for ODMA, but at least it's popular enough that the main Document Management System providers have grudgingly written their own plugins to work with MS Office. ODMA's an open protocol that's already supported by much DMS software, though, and it's unclear to me why it wasn't supported by open source office and related products long ago.
The point being though, that this level of pain will most likely be required when VIsta is rolled out in an organisation. That's why a lot of big firms will stick with XP (or even Win2K) as long as they can, but when they finally can't get support for those, or can't get it to work on any new hardware they buy, that's when the opportunity will come to shop around and look at alternatives.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?