Open source software finds home with New Zealand government

This is in line with a trend I have been watching for. In this case, it appears the NZ government is taking a very balanced approach to open source in government.

It seems that Novell is also providing support for JBoss and MySQL… something that I was not aware of. That would indicate Novell’s advantage over some other Linux providers.

As well, Novell offers what I see as a very well rounded collection of software and services – many for the back-end and some proprietary – that provide for integration with existing & legacy systems. I feel that differentiator should place them in the lead if and when open source moves to this stage of adoption in the private sector.

In any case, Novell is in a different position from Red Hat. Today Red Hat is considered by many to be in the lead. It will be interesting to see which approach works better in the long term.

-pmh