Commerce to buy Linux through purchase agreement, Aug 04, 2005

The Commerce Department has awarded a blanket purchase agreement to DLT Solutions for Red Hat software and services. Commerce personnel will be able to buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other products and services through the BPA, with DLT serving as the reseller.

Serious security bugs in key parts of the latest Linux code have been fixed, but some small glitches have been introduced, according to a recent scan.

The next five years will bring big changes in how platform and operating systems are viewed, and Linux can potentially impact dozens of markets, technologies and vendors depending on its continued evolution.

The threat to migrate to Linux has been increasingly used as a tool by both public and private sector organisations to get a better deal out of Microsoft over the last couple of years. As open source continues to mature, this is likely to feature in many of the conversations between CIOs and Microsoft salespeople when it comes to the big sell for Vista.

In a recent review article of SUSE 9.3 Professional, I discussed the advantages of using a common distribution to administer CUPS and more easily share a locally attached printer across a LAN. A reader comment about using a network-ready printer instead made me consider that alternative for multi-OS environments where a common platform is not a possibility. I am now the proud owner of a Deskjet 6840, a color inkjet printer by Hewlett-Packard (HP).

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