[Discuss] MS and Novell

[Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert]

You could probably use any distro, but you'd have to show compliance with Federal standards and state standards if you wanted to use it.  For a little guy using a distro that hasn't done that for you, means you have to.  If you want to do it with your favourite distro, then the OSS meritocracy would come in to play and you could go that direction.  Commercially backed distros will do it as a matter of course if they want to sell to that market segment.

I don't think it s a bug-bear either way as if me and a few thousand of my efriends wanted to get a distro reviewed and gaiin some compliance stamps, we could, just like building a new UI, email system, database, portal, etc.  So it still fits the OSS model as far as I ican see.

Thor HW


-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at vlug.org on behalf of pw
Sent: Wed 11/8/2006 1:13 PM
To: discuss at vlug.org
Subject: Re: [Discuss] MS and Novell
 
Thor Heinrichs-Wolpert wrote:
> Both RedHat and SuSe have employees that help Oracle work on the distro setup.  SuSe also maintains a mailing list and installation guides to help with Oracle installs.
> 
> RedHat and SuSe are similar in some areas (common core, kernel and some common packages).  Their approach to security is very different and they are going in different directions there.  Novell has also added SuSe into their Zen systems management, so if I was an ITIL shop, I could use that toolset and be 100% ITIL compliant fairly easily.  Our Linux guru has looked at the Zen stuff and found it to be very cheap, and that was without taking into account the time needed to document and setup an ITIL compliant environment without it.  Again, this is one item that has made it easier to consider bringing in Linux into these Microsoft environments as they don't need to spend thousands of dollars in showing compliance, as they can leverage Novell's work, like they leverage Microsoft's work in showing compliance with state standards.
> 
> Thor HW
> 


Compliance with government standards is a big issue. Are all states
adopting the same IT standards, I mean is it just a laundry list of
ANSI specs, or are some states more rigorous than others? What
would the most difficult level of standards be if a particular
distro wanted to compete with SuSe or RedHat? Would
it be possible for other distros to meet the same standards?
(say, to run Oracle)
If not what does that say about opensource and software freedom
of choice, and all those historical gnu-linux bug-bears that have
become the mantra of more conservative linux users?

Peter

_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
Discuss at vlug.org
http://ladybug.vlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss