Excerpt from the bulletin:
In the recent past, the choice of Linux for large enterprise class environments for North American companies was limited to one company, Red Hat. Red Hat was the only vendor that had the software portfolio and support infrastructure in place to meet the business requirements of large private and government institutions. However, with the acquisition of SUSE Linux by Novell in Jan 2004, a new strong player was introduced into the enterprise Linux market along with a new variable into Linux procurement contracts.
Both Red Hat and Novell/SUSE enterprise server operating systems were chosen to be included in the Commonwealth's current standards list of Linux server operating systems. A dual standard was chosen for several reasons. First off, although each has different methods and configurations for installation and support of typical server functions, they both run on the same underlying kernel structure and thus both with the same standard set of Linux commands and shells that is common for any distribution of Linux. Because of this, a lot of the knowledge learned by using one distribution can be applied when using another. Secondly, they both are very interoperable with each other. If one software application is developed and works on one it will also work or can be ported to another. In addition, they both come with lots of standard open source applications, utilities, and functions many of which are the same.
Other reasons for having a dual Linux product standard include the benefits of gaining knowledge of their differences, improved leverage in negotiations, and relatively low switching costs should an occasion arise when the alternate is preferable to the lead.
State's Linux Server product standards
