"The fact that Red Hat was able to achieve COE compliance for Red Hat Linux Advanced Server expels yet another myth about the enterprise readiness of open source software," said Michael Tiemann, CTO at the company.

Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio told NewsFactor that the COE validation is important for Linux because "if you're a corporate end user, you're going to say, 'Well, if it's good enough for the government, then it's going to be rugged enough, robust enough, secure enough, for me.'"

The Test

The COE, established in 1993, is the Department of Defense's software security and interoperability certification. Widely recognized across the many agencies of the U.S. government, it is considered one of the most difficult credentials to obtain.

Administered by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the certification process tests applications for "look and feel as well as functionality," the ability to execute government custom code, and security and interoperability features.

Several versions of commonly used operating systems already have achieved COE certification, including Microsoft 's Windows NT, IBM's AIX, Sun's Solaris 8 and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX.

Good for Larger Industry

Red Hat vice president Mark de Visser told NewsFactor that his company worked for close to a year to attain the certification. "Because this is the first Linux distribution that got this certification, we needed to find our way with DISA, the [government] organization that supplied it," he said.

"We ended up having a LSB (Linux Standards Base) compliance," de Visser added, "which I think is good news for the whole industry because most of the Linux distributors have already moved [to the LSB]."

Red Hat's Advanced Server achieved certification running on an Intel -based IBM eServer xSeries 330.

Reaping the Benefits

Red Hat may reap almost-immediate benefits from its achievement. Oracle chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson said, "With this announcement, Oracle will pursue Oracle9i Real Application Clusters segmentation on COE-certified Red Hat Linux Advanced Server, resulting in a highly scalable, low-cost, reliable infrastructure solution."

The Advanced Server certification also was applauded by Matt Mleziva, program director for Defense Information Infrastructure for the United States Air Force.

"The Department of Defense (DoD) can now achieve the required level of conformance so vital to joint warfare by embracing the self-governance standards created by the Linux community," Mleziva said. "This will allow the DoD to remain current with commercial technology innovations while using the self-governance model of the Linux community." (continued...)

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