eWeek: German Government Moves to GNU/Linux

[Seth Johnson <seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org>]

> http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=701&a=27712,00.asp

German Government Moves to Linux

By  Peter Galli 
June 3, 2002 


The German government on Monday said it is moving to
standardize on Linux and an open-source IT model at the
federal, state and communal levels.

As part of this move it has signed a contract of support
with IBM that will facilitate moving its agencies to Linux
and help develop innovative IT solutions based on open
standards. 

Otto Schily, the German minister of the Interior, said in a
statement released in Berlin on Monday that the contract
with IBM enabled the administration to buy IBM hardware and
software running Linux under competitive pricing conditions. 

"Linux offers the best potential as an alternative to
Windows for server operating systems to reach more
heterogeneity in the area of software. The fact that we have
an alternative to Windows with Linux gives us more
independence as a large software customer and is a major
contribution to the economic use of IT in the
administration," he said. 

An IBM spokeswoman told eWEEK that, under the terms of the
contract, IBM will deliver its eServer family pre-installed
with Linux from SuSE Linux AG, based in Nuremberg, Germany.
IBM will also create an open portal, provide a consultancy
hotline and offer test licenses. 

Big Blue has long been touting a Linux and open-source model
to the German government, which expressed a desire to move
away from proprietary solutions to open source, the
spokeswoman said. This is, however, a non-exclusive
agreement, she confirmed, declining to estimate its value or
say how long it will be in effect. 

German Interior Minister Schily said that post Sept. 11, "I
have taken the initiative to start discussions with a series
of important representatives of the IT industry in Germany
to look for ways to raise the level of security of IT
infrastructures in the public and private sector under a
framework of security partnerships." 

The contract with IBM meets three key targets for the German
government: "We raise the level of IT security by avoiding
monocultures, we lower the dependency on single software
vendors, and we reach costs savings in software and
operation costs," he said. 

The move will benefit not only the Federal Republic, but
also the states and communities, which, for the first time,
can now quickly and simply get hold of open-source systems,
he said. 

Erwin Staudt, CEO of IBM Germany, said common workgroups
have been established that will help define suitable
projects for the administration and prepare open-source
software for practical use. 

The IBM spokeswoman said the German government's move to
Linux is just the latest of more than 75 government
customers who are already using IBM Linux solutions. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Federal Aviation
Administration, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air
Force and Pinellas County, Fla., are all using Linux, as are
agencies in the governments of China, Singapore and
Australia. 

"As part of a pilot using the Linux operating system, the
FAA plans to use Linux for several key applications,
including disaster recovery, network monitoring and
troubleshooting, Web serving, file sharing, and data
mining," she said. "These Linux applications are hosted by
the USDA National Information Technology Center, with
support from IBM Global Services, running on an IBM Linux
mainframe and the WebSphere platform." 

Pinellas County is using an IBM mainframe and WebSphere
software running on Linux to create an index that houses
more than 20 million entries for quick online searches, she
said. 

Monday's announcement follows just days after Linux
developers Caldera International Inc., Conectiva S.A., SuSE
Linux AG and Turbolinux Inc. announced they are working on
creating a unified distribution that would herald a new era
of standardization for the open-source operating system and
could help drive it further into the enterprise.