Catalan government procurement (Was Re: Skolelinux participation...)
On 9 Jul, 2005, at 23:36, Sergio Talens-Oliag wrote:
If that helps advocating free software I feel that is not that bad
and
anyway the interested people knows that their *distribution* is a
customized
Debian with small changes and a different release system.
Unless you pretend to be a better Debian, but are incompatible.
I believe it is a good idea, but it seems that companies that do not
have
some kind of goverment certification won't be able to go after the
public
tender, making near to impossible the use of distributions that don't
have a company behind them, as traditional IT companies look for
partnerships with other companies for this kind of projects.
Slx Debian will be able to answer public tenders and do what's necessary
to be an approved vendor, and we will be the company behind
Debian-Edu / Skolelinux. We will work with local partners and people
and fulfill the business and technical requirements set by the
customers.
During the last 3 years we have experimented with how to spend
money successfully on a large scale free software project. The next step
is to become more visible and compete in the market and make the
customer vote for free software with their money. That said we are not
a regular company with shareholdes, but a non-profit foundation created
to
develop and deploy Skolelinux / Debian-Edu.
We're very serious about our commitment to Debian its community
and Andreas Schuldei has worked full time for Slx Debian since
Debconf 03. We paid Joey Hess 12 months to work on Debian installer
and security for Debian testing.
Sadly that means that a lot of offers will be based on the commercial
distributions (I've heard rumours about Novell and the message from
Quim
about Ubuntu)
As long as it's free software I'm happy. Remember 99.9% of the market is
non-free software. That said it's important for us to "sell" Debian-Edu
or the Debian CDD idea to local/regional project.
I'm probably one of the few that don't like Ubuntu. Not because is
backed by a compay, but because they are incompatible on
the package level with Debian. I'm old enough to remember the
war between SunOs/Solaris, Irix, HPUX, Aix etc and know that
there are absolutely know competetive advantage of having the
"best" *ix operating system. The market voted for MS.
Debian is the universal operating system and a platform
for all. We have voted eur500K on Debian/Debian-Edu so
far and after 17 years in the high tech business I have
never seen a higher ROI. Our knowledge is valuable to
any project concerned about viability.
Anyway, we will see what happens, as the tender has to be published
an
resolved soon.
We can make them an offer they can't refuse.
-vidar
(chairman slx debian)
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