The five-year Blanket Purchase Agreement was made by the Defense Information Systems Agency with Herndon, Virginia-based government-focused reseller DLT Solutions, and provides for rolling out Red Hat Enterprise Linux across the whole of the DoD as part of its Enterprise Software Initiative.
The contract covers Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, ES and WS as well as maintenance support, training and consulting, and is valued at $29m. The software will potential be supplied to all DoD departments, as well as the US Coast Guard and the Intelligence Community.
The contract is a significant boost for Linux and open source advocates who have had to contend with suggestions in recent months that Linux and open source are unsuitable for government and specifically defense systems due to the contribution process being open to the community at large.
Litigious Unix vendor SCO Group Inc sparked it off in January with the claim by CEO Darl McBride that open source software was a threat to national security. Dan O’Dowd, CEO of embedded systems vendor Green Hills Software Inc picked up the thread in April by claiming that the open source development model leaves Linux open to compromise by terrorists.
Controversial research house the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution added fuel to the fire with its president Kenneth Brown’s claim that claims that Linux contains Unix code makes it unsuitable for federal systems.
The Linux community vehemently denied all three claims and DLT’s contract with the DoD will help dampen concerns about Linux’s suitability for defense systems.
This agreement will have a positive impact on open source within the DoD by providing additional choices and flexibility, said Dawn Lawson, software product manager for DISA in a statement.
The DoD is already using Linux for a number of systems, and is in the process of installing a series of Intel Corp processor-based Linux clusters from Linux clustering specialist Linux Networx Inc, the first of which is at the Army Research Laboratory’s Major Shared Resource Center.
