Linux vendors push for government customers

WASHINGTON -- Linux vendors say they're gaining ground in the U.S. government, even though a session on open-source software in government drew a small crowd at the FOSE trade show in Washington, D.C., Thursday.

Linux and government seem to be natural allies, as governments around the world move to open more information up to citizens, said Basil Harris Jr., director of Linux solutions marketing at Novell."There's this movement toward open government, and this movement toward open software, and it would seem to be a good fit," Harris said at a FOSE session titled, Open Source, Open Government: A Match Made in Heaven?

This is the first year that Linux vendors have had their own pavilion and theater on the showroom floor at FOSE, a technology-in-government trade show that draws more than 25,000 attendees a year. While Linux vendors and user groups have exhibited at FOSE in the past, this year's conference featured more than a dozen sessions focusing on using open-source software in government.

Harris said a significant amount of Novell's business is with federal, state and local governments, including the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) although he couldn't give an exact figure. Penguin Computing Inc., another exhibitor in the Linux section at FOSE, counts about 35 percent of its sales from the U.S. government, said Matt Jacobs, vice president of sales for the hardware and Linux-based clustering software vendor.

Penguin Computing has about 2,000 customers, a growth of about 25 percent in the past year, according to the company. The number of federal government customers has kept up with that growth, staying at about 35 percent of the total number, the company said.

This year was the first for Penguin Computing at FOSE, Jacobs said, and the company is working at establishing a bigger Washington, D.C., presence. "We need to be out in front of the agencies that have been [customers] for years," he said.

While other governments, including Brazil, Thailand and Canada, have embraced open-source software, the U.S. government has been slower to adopt it, Harris said. Linux and other open-source software has found its way into many U.S. government agencies, including parts of the National Security Agency and the DOD, where research firm MITRE Corp., in a paper published in October 2002, found significant use.

But Harris asked attendees of his session why more government agencies weren't looking to open-source software as a way to save licensing costs and avoid one-vendor lock-in. Of about 20 people at the session, none raised their hands when Harris asked if their agencies are using open-source software, and only two said their organizations are considering it.

David Burkhart, a user support specialist at CHF International, said he was trying to push open-source software as a way to end monitoring of software licenses at the organization's branch offices in 35 countries. CHF International, which receives U.S. government funding to work on antipoverty programs worldwide, could avoid licensing costs and keeping track of software licenses by switching, he said.

One problem is that the organization has a software finance package that doesn't run on Linux, and users don't want to change to a new finance package, Burkhart said. "When I try to get headquarters and the field offices to change, my head just spins," he said.