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?"

Why, Debian of course ...

[hherb]

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

Re:Going with the devil you know

[gtoomey]

Nonsense. There are companies that install and maintain Debian specifically for Government like http://togaware.com/ [togaware.com]

A further note regarding the situation...

[tmasky]

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 =)

Re:Going with the devil you know

[kuiken]

Its not just about debian beeing supported its about the whole platform.
Oracle wont support any installation on debian
hardware vendors will offer no support either.

Criticism

[Domstersch]

There has already been a fair bit of (poorly researched) criticism of this plan - a good example pointed out to me by the guys at the New Zealand Open Source Society was this article in New Zealand's National Business Review:

Open source in government: A delusional cheer from the Greens [nbr.co.nz]

Among the more irrational claims made against OS in this article is:

Even in servers, its strongest point of contention, Linux holds only a very minor share of the market.

Looks like someone hadn't seen that Netcraft doesn't confirm it [slashdot.org] (assuming Apache is mostly run on Linux, right?).

Interesting question, considering

[Anonymous Coward]

"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." [slashdot.org]

Re:Criticism

[dacaffinator]

The thing about the NBR is, well to be blunt, they're all clueless rich wankers.

Re:Why, Debian of course ...

[cortana]

Ahem? [debian.org]

Re:Criticism

[burnin1965]

Actually the Apache install base is not a good measure of the linux install base. Netcraft at one time tracked operating systems but they stopped sometime in 2001.

However, the older Netcraft surveys do suggest a significant linux presence and the author of the NBR article is misrepresenting the article to which he references.

Based on old Netcraft surveys linux likely has around a 30% market share in web servers and Windows has around 50%. That is far from tiny and insignificant and based on information from the report to which the NBR article refers I suspect that linux market share may be increasing.

http://survey.netcraft.com/index-200106.html [netcraft.com]

And for anyone who actualy reads the IDC article to which the NBR tripe refers they will discover that while linux only holds 11.5% of quarterly revenues for servers shipped from large system builders, which again is not tiny and insignificant, the growth of linux revenue and shipments is 3 to 4 times that of Windows. So with Windows server revenue at $12 billion and linux revenue at $1 billion and 3 to 4 times the growth it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that linux is going to eat somebodies lunch.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS0022 3005 [idc.com]

The author of the NBR article seems to have a preconcieved notion of the world around him and even when he reads contradictory facts he maintains his illusion.

burnin