WASHINGTON -- Proprietary software makers say they don't view Linux and its brethren as an immediate threat to their dominance inside the federal government.
A Wired News survey of 14 Cabinet-level agencies found little official adoption of free operating systems and bureaucratic obstacles such as lists of approved products that stand in the way of future gains.
"The government is like other customers in that they buy based on business value. Open source itself has little to do with business value for most customers, who don't modify the code or even look at it," said Peter Houston, director of Microsoft's Windows Server Product Management Group.
"When we compete with open-source solutions, it is usually against IBM, which seems to be trying to turn the concept of open source into a value proposition," Houston said. "We find that such an approach only makes sense in very limited niche scenarios where access to source is required by a particular agency."
IBM and Hewlett-Packard have recently announced sales of powerful Linux computers to federal agencies, including the Air Force, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Defense Department.
Microsoft's antagonism toward open-source software is, of course, both fierce and long-standing. Last year, Microsoft operating systems chief Jim Allchin likened it to an un-American movement, and the famous leaked Halloween documents showed that Microsoft viewed Linux as a "credible" threat.
More recently, the Washington Post reported last month that Microsoft unsuccessfully tried to convince the Defense Department to virtually prohibit the use of open-source software.
"The real issue of Linux open-source software adoption has to do not only with the availability and maturity of applications but with political agendas," said Stacey Quandt, an analyst for Linux and open source at the Giga Information Group.
Last month, the California state government announced it would cancel a $95 million contract with Oracle after allegations of wrongdoing and influence-peddling.
For its part, Oracle is almost as dismissive as Microsoft.
"For the federal government, the No. 1 thing is security when it comes to open source," Oracle spokeswoman Kristen Hollins said.
"I don't think that Oracle sees competition with open source," Hollins said. "We've actually embraced open source and use open source on Apache servers. Our products have 20 years of product development behind them and are very secure. There's a lot of security and third-party security validation."
Oracle may use open-source products on its servers, but its hardly inexpensive databases compete directly with free software products like MySQL. That big price difference convinced a team at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to make the switch from Oracle to MySQL.
The Census Bureau has a site license for Oracle, but the agency found it cheaper and more efficient to use MySQL for statistics servers.
"We recently announced that we would ship Linux based servers -- low priced horizontal Linux servers," said John Leahy, chief of staff at Sun Microsystems Federal. "We feel that Linux offers a definite alternative to proprietary and closed operating systems like Microsoft Windows."
"There's a lot of issues related to Linux on a mainframe," Leahy said. "In terms of Linux's history in that kind of environment, it's relatively short. Just from experience from a reliability and scalability standpoint, Linux has a long way to go to mature yet."
Linux vendor Red Hat, which is based in Raleigh, North Carolina and supports Linux as an enterprise system, says its operating system is popular inside the federal government -- whether top management knows or not.
"I've visited a whole lot of government organizations. Virtually every government agency I've visited has Linux somewhere in the enterprise," said Robert Hibbard, Red Hat's director of professional consulting. "The question is: Does anyone know about it?"
Hibbard said that the grass-roots adoption of Linux at federal agencies often obscures the real popularity: "I suspect at least half of those who say they don't use it have it in their enterprise but don't know about it."
Open Source (a.k.a Free Software) is a generic term applied to programs for which the source code is available and freely redistributable. Such software is usually available at no cost. The most common license is the GNU General Public License. The GNU/Linux operating system is Free Software.
