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?"Ads_xl=0;Ads_yl=0;Ads_xp='';Ads_yp='';Ads_xp1='';Ads_yp1='';Ads_par='';Ads_cnturl='';Ads_prf='page=article';Ads_channels='RON_P6_IMU';Ads_wrd='novell,it';Ads_kid=0;Ads_bid=0;Ads_sec=0; New Zealand Government Open Source with Novell Log in/Create an Account | Top | 153 comments | Search Discussion Display Options Threshold: -1: 153 comments 0: 147 comments 1: 109 comments 2: 68 comments 3: 25 comments 4: 18 comments 5: 13 comments Flat Nested No Comments Threaded Oldest First Newest First Highest Scores First Oldest First (Ignore Threads) Newest First (Ignore Threads) The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. linux (Score:2) by Ruede (824831) on Thursday October 27, @05:55AM (#13887695) debian :) [ Reply to ThisRe:linux by lynzh (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @06:07AMRe:linux by Neo-Rio-101 (Score:3) Thursday October 27, @06:09AMRe:linux by micheas (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @08:49AMRe:linux by Neo-Rio-101 (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @09:30AMRe:linux by rtb61 (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @09:50PM1 reply beneath your current threshold.Re:-march=new-zealand -O2 -fomit-untuned-distro -p by Handpaper (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @08:26AM1 reply beneath your current threshold.Re:Mods? by m4dm4n (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @07:19AM1 reply beneath your current threshold. Novell SUE Linux 10.0 (Score:1, Troll) by Flaming Foobar (597181) on Thursday October 27, @05:58AM (#13887698) I'm sure it's a pure coincidence that this coincides with the release of Novell SUSE Linux 10.0 [novell.com]. [ Reply to This Re:Novell SUE Linux 10.0 (Score:4, Funny) by maxwell demon (590494) on Thursday October 27, @06:01AM (#13887704) (Last Journal: Wednesday August 14, @01:33PM) SUE Linux? Is that a distribution specifically tailored for lawyers? [ Reply to This | ParentRe:Novell SUE Linux 10.0 by Musteval (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @06:33AMRe:Novell SUE Linux 10.0 by chris_eineke (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @07:20AMRe:Novell SUE Linux 10.0 by ScrewMaster (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @10:27PMRe:Novell SUE Linux 10.0 by poolmeister (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @08:28AM1 reply beneath your current threshold. Going with the devil you know (Score:4, Insightful) by ReformedExCon (897248) <reformed.excon@gmail.com> on Thursday October 27, @06:01AM (#13887703) There is a lot to be said for sticking with your current vendor and infrastructure. First, the cost of switching is a huge factor when making a platform switch. If it were a piece of cake, then sure, go with the vendor that gives you the most bang for your buck, but real life is hardly like that.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. [ Reply to ThisRe:Going with the devil you know by gtoomey (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @06:06AM Re:Going with the devil you know (Score:5, Insightful) by C0vardeAn0nim0 (232451) <covarde DOT anonimo AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday October 27, @06:57AM (#13887824) (http://www.comofazer.net/wiki/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 21, @07:18AM) the distro costs _NOTHING_, zero, zip, nada...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.." [ Reply to This | Parent Re:Going with the devil you know (Score:5, Informative) by gtoomey (528943) on Thursday October 27, @06:47AM (#13887803) Nonsense. There are companies that install and maintain Debian specifically for Government like http://togaware.com/ [togaware.com] [ Reply to This | Parent Re:Going with the devil you know (Score:5, Informative) by kuiken (115647) on Thursday October 27, @07:01AM (#13887833) (http://slashdot.org/) Its not just about debian beeing supported its about the whole platform.Oracle wont support any installation on debianhardware vendors will offer no support either. [ Reply to This | ParentRe:Going with the devil you know by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @10:48AMRe:Going with the devil you know by Trogre (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @05:57PM1 reply beneath your current threshold.1 reply beneath your current threshold. a home made one... (Score:5, Insightful) by C0vardeAn0nim0 (232451) <covarde DOT anonimo AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday October 27, @06:04AM (#13887711) (http://www.comofazer.net/wiki/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 21, @07:18AM) that's what public universities are for.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... [ Reply to ThisRe:a home made one... by rustbear (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @06:27AMRe:a home made one... by C0vardeAn0nim0 (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @07:20AM Re:a home made one... (Score:5, Insightful) by hugesmile (587771) on Thursday October 27, @06:43AM (#13887796) You'd trust your critical systems to a bunch of unpaid volunteers? It's better to trust a real linux distri... Oh wait... [ Reply to This | ParentRe:a home made one... by strider44 (Score:3) Thursday October 27, @07:46AM1 reply beneath your current threshold.Re:a home made one... by Koushiro (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @06:51AMRe:a home made one... by root-a-begger (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @08:14AMRe:a home made one... by Petrushka (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @07:46PM1 reply beneath your current threshold. Which distro? (Score:2, Insightful) by Anti-Trend (857000) on Thursday October 27, @06:05AM (#13887712) (http://www.hardwareforums.com/) If you were a government, which linux distribution would you choose?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. [ Reply to This Good for Linux (Score:5, Insightful) by skingers6894 (816110) on Thursday October 27, @06:05AM (#13887713) This is an example where Novell is good for Linux. It's much easier for a government to "stick with Novell" than "jump to open source". It sounds safer somehow even if the end result is the same for Linux. [ Reply to This If I were a government... (Score:5, Interesting) by FluffyPanda (821763) on Thursday October 27, @06:07AM (#13887720) If I were a government looking for a software platform I would most definately choose Novell. You get the level of support that you need with the advantage that you are getting an open platform on which to work. If you have trouble with your Novell linux you can easily get Redhat in to take over, bring in consultants to help out or even set up a department to do it yourself.But we all know that, right? Is anyone on Slashdot actually thinking that choosing SLES over, say RHEL or (god forbid) a custom Gentoo approach is a bad decision?My personal opinion is that Novell / SuSE is a better approach than RedHat since Novell has a better desktop product (actually, a better range of desktop offerings) to go along with its server software. [ Reply to ThisRe:If I were a government... by LnxAddct (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @07:21AMRe:If I were a government... by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @11:34AMRe:If I were a government... by killjoe (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @03:06PM Why, Debian of course ... (Score:5, Informative) by hherb (229558) <horst&dorrigomedical,com> on Thursday October 27, @06:14AM (#13887731) (http://drugref.org/) 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 [ Reply to ThisRe:Why, Debian of course ... by tmasky (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @06:41AMRe:Why, Debian of course ... by Malor (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @07:06AM Re:Why, Debian of course ... (Score:4, Informative) by cortana (588495) <<ku.gro.stobor> <ta> <mas>> on Thursday October 27, @08:07AM (#13888001) (http://robots.org.uk/) Ahem? [debian.org] [ Reply to This | ParentRe:Why, Debian of course ... by tmasky (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @02:31PMRe:Why, Debian of course ... by killjoe (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @03:12PMRe:Why, Debian of course ... by cortana (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @03:37PM1 reply beneath your current threshold. I know the reason (Score:2, Funny) by dzafez (897002) on Thursday October 27, @06:14AM (#13887733) (http://www.dzafez.de/) Since there are no licenses, OpenSource is much sheeper. [ Reply to ThisOoh, I know this game by a.different.perspect (Score:3) Thursday October 27, @06:58AMRe:Ooh, I know this game by chris_eineke (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @07:23AMRe:Ooh, I know this game by FluffyPanda (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @08:46AM1 reply beneath your current threshold.1 reply beneath your current threshold.1 reply beneath your current threshold.1 reply beneath your current threshold. One-way ticket (Score:1) by FishandChips (695645) on Thursday October 27, @06:15AM (#13887736) Could be a smart move. I guess the CEO of Novell will shortly be needing to flee to somewhere a long way away after his "investors" have finished with him. [ Reply to This The people, the government, and software (Score:5, Insightful) by mikaelhg (47691) on Thursday October 27, @06:32AM (#13887766) I'm not "a government" but instead work for one.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. [ Reply to ThisRe:The people, the government, and software by the_rev_matt (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @09:49AMRe:The people, the government, and software by mikaelhg (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @10:00AM If I were a government... (Score:2, Interesting) by boxxa (925862) on Thursday October 27, @06:34AM (#13887772) (http://boxxa.com/) At home and in my office I run SuSE linux. I can adapt it to run any application stable to perform the business needs and also it can be adapted to virtually any working environment. Also, the user interface is very friendly with Yast but I think that the true distro that would excel the others is the one that will provide large deployments with the support for their users while they learn the new software and help them work the software into their existing operations, which from the article, Novell seems to provide pretty well. [ Reply to This Mix and Match to Strengths and Weakness (Score:3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27, @06:40AM (#13887786) Simple look at the needs of the Organization and choose a mixture:1. OpenBSD for the Bastion Side, Firewalls, IDS, Routers.2. Linux for File Shares, DB's and apps. {Suse, Redhat}3. Client Side: Xandros, knopticsEach item would be rated against a check list of items. [ Reply to ThisRe:Mix and Match to Strengths and Weakness by petermgreen (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @03:08PM Redhat is not the one (Score:5, Interesting) by harryoyster (814652) on Thursday October 27, @06:42AM (#13887794) (http://forum.lucidnow.com/) Having been working in an Redhat enterprise linux environment for so many years we have recently began to shift all servers over to novel. Since that time we have had less issues and the overall support from novel has been awesome to say the least. PLUS in our case it costs significantly less than the same Redhat licensing fees (redhat network etc).We have also several slackware and debian boxes doing other things. Go Novel, Say no to redhat. [ Reply to This1 reply beneath your current threshold. A further note regarding the situation... (Score:5, Informative) by tmasky (862064) on Thursday October 27, @06:48AM (#13887806) 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 =) [ Reply to This1 reply beneath your current threshold. If I were a government, (Score:2, Insightful) by linforcer (923749) on Thursday October 27, @06:54AM (#13887817) I'd choose the one with the biggest company backing it, because that's what governments tend to do, and well, surprise, surprise, what did New Zealand do? [ Reply to This Criticism (Score:4, Informative) by Domstersch (737775) <dominics@NOspam.gmail.com> on Thursday October 27, @07:01AM (#13887836) (http://somethingemporium.com/) 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?). [ Reply to ThisRe:Criticism by dacaffinator (Score:3) Thursday October 27, @07:10AMRe:Criticism by killjoe (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @03:20PMwhy is it such a problem? by xmodem_and_rommon (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @07:12AMRe:Criticism by Secrity (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @07:21AMRe:Criticism by Domstersch (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @07:34AMRe:Criticism by burnin1965 (Score:3) Thursday October 27, @11:23AMRe:Criticism by killjoe (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @03:16PMRe:Criticism by Trogre (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @05:37PMRe:Criticism by superiority (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @08:20PM1 reply beneath your current threshold.Re:Criticism by Hydroksyde (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @08:39PM Why only one? (Score:2, Insightful) by The Famous Brett Wat (12688) on Thursday October 27, @07:01AM (#13887838) (http://www.nutters.org/user/famous | Last Journal: Saturday March 22, @01:57PM) It may not be as simple as selecting one single vendor, but I'd be inclined to deal with the problem in the following way. For a start, choose something that's supported by more than one vendor. You're pretty much obliged to do this to avoid vendor lock-in, right? And we want to avoid that. So, given that it's available from more than one viable vendor, choose two vendors and give your subordinates the leeway to select one or the other on a case by case basis. That way your suppliers keep each other on their toes, rather than resting on the fact that switching vendors is going to cause you more hassle than it's worth. A federal government is going to be sufficiently large that they don't have to offer an exclusive contract to attract tenders. Well, maybe not New Zealand, but most federal governments. [ Reply to ThisRe:Why only one? by GileadGreene (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @11:12AM Interesting question, considering (Score:2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27, @07:04AM (#13887850) "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] [ Reply to ThisInteresting comment, considering by burnin1965 (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @12:22PM It's all about support (Score:4, Insightful) by mwvdlee (775178) on Thursday October 27, @07:15AM (#13887870) As a government, or pretty much anybody with a lot to loose, you'd want to go with a distribution that...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. [ Reply to ThisRe:It's all about support by Ricin (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @08:26AMRe:It's all about support by Finuvir (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @09:45AM1 reply beneath your current threshold. Not a bad idea. (Score:2) by FridayBob (619244) on Thursday October 27, @07:19AM (#13887886) It's good for open source, it's good for Novell and it's good for the New Zealand government. After all, open source software may not come with any licensing fees, but somebody still has to install it, make sure it all works as expected and maintain it for you afterwards. Also, a lot of people had their doubts as to whether Novell's new open source business plan was going to work. Hell, I used to be a CNE and just a short while ago I thought M$ had pretty much succeeded in making the company irrelevant. Now it looks like I may have been wrong about that. You think maybe it'd be smart to start studying for some of their exams again? Just to add some color to your CV, of course. ;-) [ Reply to This Use tax money locally (Score:3, Insightful) by spectrokid (660550) on Thursday October 27, @07:36AM (#13887927) (http://sourceforge.net/projects/karekol/) What distro? The one you can get best LOCAL support for. Why send off tax dollars to some MegaCorp in the US if you can create LOCAL jobs and support LOCAL companies? [ Reply to ThisRe:Use tax money locally by TuataraShoes (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @08:23AM Distro choice (Score:1, Funny) by bensch128 (563853) on Thursday October 27, @07:48AM (#13887960) I'd roll my own and then convince the government to pay me a gigantic support contract.Then when they have problems with openoffice or mozilla, i'd tell them to go complain to the project developers.Ben [ Reply to This Where does this all lead? (Score:5, Interesting) by LaughingCoder (914424) on Thursday October 27, @07:58AM (#13887979) There is obviously a trend towards open source platforms and away from proprietary platforms. On that we can probably all agree. The question I have is, what happens next? Assume 2 or 3 Linux distributions end up becoming widespread and dominant. Assume Windows becomes just one of many rather than being ubiquitous. Let's think outside the box and assume that even Apple ekes out more than a 3% share of the desktop. What is the impact of this on application developers? Sure, the "generic" apps like those found in the various Office products will continue to evolve, copy each other, exchange data with each other, and be the primary application most people use in their jobs. But what about the specialty applications: audio/video editing, medical and scientific applications, airline reservation systems, tax preparation software, web content creation, etc, etc? Do "best-in-class" applications emerge for each of these niches - tied to a single platform? Does the whole world switch to open source so the platform doesn't matter? My big fear is we end up like it was in the 1970's all over again where you are forced to choose a platform to get the particular application you need. And if you need multiple applications, you end up supporting multiple platforms. Yes, standards that address interoperability can help in this regard, but if you want best-in-class you will not have much choice, and we all know that supporting multiple platforms is more work than supporting one. [ Reply to ThisIt has already lead to by wombatmobile (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @08:32AMYou're about 20 years late, son by rfc1394 (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @08:58AMRe:You're about 20 years late, son by LaughingCoder (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @09:10AMRe:You're about 20 years late, son by zcat_NZ (Score:1) Thursday October 27, @03:40PMRe:Where does this all lead? by killjoe (Score:2) Thursday October 27, @03:10PM1 reply beneath your current threshold. Custom Gentoo created by government IT department (Score:1) by Jessta (666101) on Thursday October 27, @08:22AM (#13888053) (http://jessta.homelinux.net/) I'd have the IT department put together a distrobution based on Gentoo.This would allow the IT department to have an exact idea of what is in the system and exactly how it's going to work.This would require the IT staff to have the expertise to properly support this setup without external support. But most governments should already have such resources.- Jesse McNelis [ Reply to This