Certifying
Linux
The
Federal Government has always been fussy about its vendors, often
making them jump through extra hoops for the privilege of doing
business with them. In this time of national insecurity, some of
that seems justified.
To insure its acceptability by the federal government (and
especially by
the Department of Defense, e.g., the DOD), Linux products are going
through the DOD certification process.
Red Hat has just announced that it has received DOD COE
certification
for its Advanced Server, recognizing, the company claims, the
strength
of its enterprise security and interoperability. The DOD
certification
is used across the U.S. government as a critical computing standard.
Red Hat Linux Advanced Server achieved certification running on
IBM eServer xSeries 330.
IBM is in the process of certifying a number of its software
products on
Linux with the federal government and Oracle is also in the federal
certification process.
All of this makes it clear that Linux is becoming well accepted as a
computing platform in spite of the unusual way in which the
operating
system's software is developed and enhanced, utilizing the services
of
thousands of unpaid volunteers in addition to paid technical staff
in
Linux-supporting software companies. It's simply another way to get
to
the goal of good software, the federal certification seems to say.
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