Several national governments (e.g., Singapore, Taiwan, and Germany) have stated their intent to move their server architectures to Linux from Windows.
Taking this a step farther, China and India are developing economic policies to foster Linux expertise within their countries to create competitive advantage and anticipate growing demand for Linux software skills. Meanwhile, the UK government used the threat of moving to Linux when negotiating a three-year contract renewal with Microsoft, gaining a projected $150 million in savings over the life of the contract.

Even in the U.S., the Department of Defense (DoD), National Security Agency (NSA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are investigating the use of Linux and open-source software on servers.

Situation analysis
International concern about Microsoft's formidable market presence is one of the issues driving the interest in Linux on servers among governments. The increasing dominance of Microsoft--first on the desktop, and, in the past few years, on low-end to midrange servers--has worried some decision makers in governments worldwide. Large governments also see practical advantages in helping to create a competitor to Microsoft in the server environment. For instance, when the UK government's license agreement came up for renewal earlier this year, it used the threat that it might marginalize Windows on its servers and move to Linux on Intel to negotiate a better contract. Although this was the result of an astute purchasing team realizing the opportunity to gain an advantage at the negotiating table rather than a set policy, it still points the way to best practice.

Germany has strong advocates of Linux for servers in its federal government. However, they are focused more on cost reduction than on concerns about Microsoft. The German federal government as well as individual states are struggling with huge deficits and investigating any opportunity (backed by multiple studies) to cut costs. The key promoter is the Department of the Interior (DOI, which is also pushing local governments towards Linux), which originally even wanted to have Linux take over the desktop. For now, the German focus is solely on servers, due to concerns that users would find a desktop transition to Linux difficult, and because the DOI has a multiyear contract with Microsoft that it cannot break.

In the U.S., NASA is using Linux with the Bastille Hardening System on numerous servers. The DoD is conducting a separate Linux "hardening" program--the "Secure Auditing for Linux" program--using funds from DARPA. The presumed goal of this project is to develop a version of Linux that meets DoD security standards for military use. The NSA has released a secure version of Linux back to open source and continues to improve the security extensions it has developed for Linux. NIST has published an IP reference version of Linux, and has been developing clustering capabilities and other Linux extensions for at least three years. NIST, in particular, has a tradition of releasing its developments publicly based on the philosophy that its work is funded by tax dollars, and we expect it to continue to release its Linux extensions back into the open source community--making Linux a more full-featured server operating system.