New Zealand Government Open Source with Novell 162
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?"
Linux From Scratch (Score:0, Insightful)
-whakawhaka
Going with the devil you know (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
a home made one... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Which distro? (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Good for Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
The people, the government, and software (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:a home made one... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were a government, (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Going with the devil you know (Score:5, Insightful)
the deal is for tech support, migration, development of custom apps...
even if they go debian or slack or fedora... they'll still have to pay for tech support.
this "distro X is free, so is more bang for the buck" speech is what scares companies away from migrating to open plataforms. the ones who fell for this got severelly burned once they saw the cost of the support.
if you want to convince someone to migrate, be honest. say "the software is free, but related costs exists and they're as high as microsoft's one. what you really get for your cash is the freedom to choose vendor, the assurance that your data will still be available in 20 years, etc., etc., etc.."
Why only one? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's all about support (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:a home made one... (Score:2, Insightful)
Use tax money locally (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:a home made one... (Score:3, Insightful)
Governments Play Safe (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Going with the devil you know (Score:1, Insightful)
HP offers support for Debian for many of it's products.
http://h20219.www2.hp.com/services/cache/76815-0-
I think the most accurate statement you can make about sticking that government sticking with Novell is that they are probably happy with the service that Novell provided in the past and that means that they will likely like the support provided by Novell into the future.
Why bust a good thing?
Anyways. Novell has the most expertise when it comes to desktop and groupware systems. They are the ones that basicly created the first network directory system for desktops that the average admin could deal with! Microsoft basicly took all of Novell's concepts when it created AD. They made enterprise desktops what it is today.
It's just tough to compete with Microsoft 'enterprise/groupware' software when Microsoft owns the only viable desktop platform.
As far as large desktop deployments goes Novell would be my first choice.
If I needed to combine open source software technology like Lustre, GFS, and clustering file services with a large IBM NAS storage solution with support from Oracle and Veratis software.. I'd choose Redhat.
But I dont' think that 90% of Redhat's engineers haven't touched a 'real' desktop since they stopped using Windows 95.
I mean just look at 'bluecurve'!
Novell is to desktops and desktop support systems what Redhat + IBM is to servers.
Re:If I were a government... (Score:1, Insightful)
What all the folks touting Debian fail to understand is that Novell has done a TON of work getting Linux to play well at all levels of the enterprise. They have the Novell Linux Desktop (Ximian) as a supportable, maintainable desktop platform with red carpet (or whatever it's currently called) for management, they have SLES9 as an App server which is 100% supported by Oracle and others, they have the OES version (Open Enterprise Server) with eDirectory integration and all the identity manageement tools that go with it, and they support it all with a 24/7 call center.
If you were a Government that already had a releationship with Novell, and you were looking for a smooth transition path to Linux, why on earth wouldn't you stay with them?
If you were any company looking to transition to Linux, why wouldn't you look at them?
No, I don't work for them, but I do work for a school district that is at the same phase of transition.