Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Novell Signs Linux Deal with Australian Government

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the foot-in-the-door dept.

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."

3 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Why don't all governments... by Eightyford · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why don't all governments switch to Linux? Microsoft's Vista release should be the perfect opportunity for government agencies to get out of this vendor lock-in. What programs are government agencies using that can't run on Linux? Open source word processing on linux should be ready for primetime soon, and until then wordperfect is still available. Any non-activeX web app should not be a problem either.

    I just hope that any new government created is not made with Microsoft SQL and .NET. That would be stupid.

    --
    Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
  2. Re:why sign... by mikerozh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... when you can download for free?

    Because you can't download a free support :)

  3. Novell are doing a lot of things right by gregluck · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A year ago Novell seemed to have lost its way with its SuSE initative. The executive who had directed the open source strategy had departed, and much of the rest of the company just didn't get it.

    Then they decided to release OpenSuse. OpenSuse is now more popular than Fedora Core. That won back the devs like me who had not been listening. And OpenSuse is polished.

    This announcement of itself is not that huge. But when taken with the other things they have been doing I can see that Novell can gain mindshare amongst developers and their traditional corporate base. That bodes well for them.