Japanese Government to Move to OSS

An anonymous reader writes "Linuxworld has up an article on the Japanese government's plan to reduce its reliance on a single IT vendor by moving to open source software. 'Oracle, NEC, IBM, HP, Hitachi and Dell are among 10 IT equipment and software vendors that are forming a consortium to develop and sell Linux-based servers and computers for the Japanese market. The move by the vendors to collaborate on Linux in Japan comes from a edict from the country's government to make Linux and open source a priority for all IT procurements, starting this July.' The government has said explicitly it wants to decrease its reliance on Microsoft as a server operating system platform."

Comments

No wonder Microsoft is scared

[kamochan]

No wonder Microsoft is scared and trying to pull FOSS patent issues out of their sleeve. They really do need to hang on to their existing customers with their bare teeth... competing with products seems to be something they are unable to do these days (well, ever, really).

Re:No wonder Microsoft is scared

[paganizer]

I sort of have to disagree with that.
Windows 2000 was, is, and will be (until the process of making it obsolete via lack of patches to make it compliant with new hardware is complete) very competitive with anything else, especially when you factor in ease of use and administration.
I switched from the HP-UX / Solaris world to the Microsoft world professionally in '97 when I discovered that A) I could make more money that way, and B) that I actually liked being able to work with a product I was playing games on at home.
When Win2k came along, it was like validation; I didn't at the time, and still don't, like what they did with the DNS server & Active Directory, but it DID work, and worked well.
Towards the middle of NT 4's life, and until about 6 months after the release of win2k, things were sweet in microsoft land; things worked, if you blocked all the ports except the ones you actually used you were pretty safe, and the OS did everything; search engine, internet chat server, web server, early versions of VOIP, the list goes on & on. and if you shelled out the money for a good copy of office 2000, you got a free copy of SQL server and a whole crapload of web-enabled toys to play with from the OSE.
Almost immediately thereafter, however, Microsoft obviously began to come to the conclusion that they had succeeded too well; there was no real reason to upgrade from win2k/office2k. ever.
So they started killing it. They started killing function via patch. the fully developed 64-bit patch was put on the shelf until after the release of WinXP, except for in a highly expensive version of (not absolutely sure about this) Windows 2000 database server LE. Some people think that the code "leak" of 2004 was intentional, in order to push people either to XP or windows 2003. No effort was made to make intel hyperthreading CPU's work properly (they do work, but count each tread as a separate CPU, which they aren't, causing slowdowns). and .NET.
In recent years, companies have started releasing games that fail to install on win2k; in all examples to date, the games can be forced to install on win2k, and work easily as well as they do on the target platform.
I retired from full time work for a couple of years now, but when I do consults, it's either Debian, Solaris or Win2k. Screw the .net crap and it's descendants.
(Feel free to disagree, this is mainly my spur of the moment opinion and not highly researched)