Re: US DoD? "We don't use that German ****!"?

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On Monday 18 August 2003 03:51 pm, Navindra Umanee wrote:
> "So DoD organizations can just switch to SuSE to meet the Common
> Criteria requirement, right? Not likely, because -- as one DoD CIO is
> reported to have said -- "We don't use that German ****!" As one might
> well imagine, the US Department of Defense is an extremely "top-down"
> environment, and US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's grudge
> against those so-called "Old Europe" countries Germany and France is
> reflected at all levels."

   Interesting, but not all true. First, and most importantly, SuSE isn't 
"because SuSE is quite scrupulous in observing the Gnu General Public License 
(GPL)," at least in its own code. The YaST License fails the criterion of 
both the Free Software Foundation and OSI. In other words, its a non-Free 
license... indeed, it is somewhere between Microsoft Shared Source (tm) and 
Free Software in nature, but definately leans on the MSS side of things.

   The second point, I would say, is that preferably I think a military should 
use its own country's resources. Being dependent on any other country is 
silly if the country's own products would suffice (or an international 
non-centrally located product such as Debian). I mean, if the DoD buys from 
Red Hat, it creates more jobs for the people that pay for the DoD to exist. 
It also means that if we get in a war of words with Germany (very 
unfortunate, but possible) our IT infrastructure can't be hurt (good thing).

   Other Red Hat advantages:

   1.) RHN functionality makes updates easier to deploy, best I can tell, than 
YaST YOU.

   2.) Red Hat is speeding towards becoming a completely open development 
cycle, leading to transparency and even the ability for the DoD to directly 
influence areas of the distribution it finds weak. SuSE is uses an ultra 
closed development model similar to that of proprietary software.

   3.) Red Hat, unlike what I noted about SuSE a moment ago, is GPL friendly, 
releasing everything as GPL.

   4.) Red Hat has a political lobby in Washington, which can help appease the 
politicians and keep them from bothering the DoD deployments. :-)

   Ideal alternate solution: DoD pays to get the proper certifications for 
Debian GNU/Linux.  

    -Tim
 
- -- 
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Timothy R. Butler       Universal Networks      www.uninet.info
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