An Australian government procurement official in has publicly endorsed Linux, telling agencies the open source operating system has "no downsides".
In an address to delegates at a New South Wales Department of Commerce exhibition on Wednesday, official Cameron Parle touted the benefits of open source to state departments and agencies, at one stage referring to wearing his own metaphorical "red hat", a reference to the Linux vendor of the same name.
"There's no doubt you can deploy Linux in any situation, it's truly robust and flexible," he said.
"It has the potential to save huge sums of money.
"You get it all with Linux, there's no downsides."
Parle's speech covered the NSW government's recently-created procurement panel for open source enterprise software and services. The 11-vendor panel, which Parle helped create, was designed to cut the time and money agencies would otherwise spend issuing their own tenders for open-source software.
"We want to be able to consider open source and feel confident about it," Parle told attendees.
The professional services vendors included in the panel could demonstrate the total cost of ownership savings of adopting Linux to an interested agency's particular infrastructure, according to Parle.
"You don't get companies like IBM, Red Hat, Novell, committing to Linux if there's no money in it," he said.
Vendors on the panel include CSC, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sol1, Starcom, Sun and System Integration Services.
Steven Deare reported from Sydney for ZDNet Australia. For more ZDNet Australia stories, click here.
Talkback
This is indeed exciting.
However, having spent almost 5 years in evaluating various Linux systems to replace MickySoft.
I have been very disappointed in the clumsy and at times annoying limitations in the Printer Interface used on all the main distributions especially those using the Mozilla suites, Evident also in the printer switching and page formatting in Netscape/Mozilla etc on Windows.
The KDE suite appeared to be the only Desktop even close to the functionality and performance of Windows/Macintosh systems.
but it is not set up as the primary interface.
The other failure I found was that there is nothing to equal the Roxio CD recording suite with its CD Cover Data Transfer. Suites I have tried require a lot of fiddling and often failed in recording.