According to this article at TheRegister. The US Navy is looking to standardize the second biggest network (after the Internet itself) on a Linux distribution. Apparently that amounts to 250,000 local servers and approximately the same number of remote servers. If a deal like that was to go to Novell or Redhat, it could single handedly make that distributor the biggest Linux distributor in the world (a place currently occupied by Redhat). Apparently Chris Christopher of the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Information Technology told ComputerWorld that they already have a significant Linux presence on their network along with most every other Operating System released in the last 15 years. Hence the need to standardize.
If the Navy standardizes on an Open Source Linux distribution, it would alleviate the worry about vendor lock-in which it seems is one of their more significant concerns. This concern is lessened somewhat by Linux because of the openness of the data formats in that one vendors distribution could take the place of another with minimal effort. The same cannot be said for companies like Microsoft who appear to have based their business on being hard to migrate away from, all the while touting interoperability in the press. That difficulty to migrate away from has resulted in much press from Microsoft’s “get the facts” campaign as being another reason why it’s better to stay with Windows. Obviously they never mention the fact that they themselves are the reason it is more difficult to migrate to another non-Microsoft platform.
