France subsidises Linux vendor

The US and Europe have seen such government subsidies before, notably with the joint development of the Concorde by Britain and France, and again later with rise of mostly French subsidised AirBus Industrie.

Although the Concorde has been a commercial disappointment overall due to high development costs, supersonic flight and landing restrictions, and poor operating economics, AirBus has managed to wrest significant market share away from Boeing, the only other large airplane company.

MandrakeSoft's "Clic" Linux clustering will compete with other vendors' Linux clustering solutions from IBM and Dell surely... plus maybe later entrants from HP and SUN. They are planning a low cost model for this, and the plan is to use Linux clusters for high-performance computing.

Meanwhile, a US government contracted MITRE study has discovered rather widespread use of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) among various US Department of Defense (DoD) agencies, and has recommended increased use of FOSS in the US government. That weighty MITRE study is available here (PDF version).

However, most of those agencies are still scratching their heads about who is going to pay for all the many needed certifications, we hear.

Perhaps the US government can take a clue from the French government and pony up for certifying Free Software. Sure sounds reasonable to me.

The C|net article is here. µ