http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=2489 <snip> Previously Siemens was a wholly Microsoft house and there was no inclination to offer open source,” he says. Recently, however, Siemens identified open source as having a “very viable business case”. With the South African government making very public declarations of interest in open source software, Honigwachs could well be on the right track. “Open source gives us a competitive advantage,” he says. Siemens already has in place partnerships and agreements with Red Hat, Canonical and enterprise content management suite providers Alfresco. With a Red Hat partnership in place Siemens will also be looking to use JBoss in place of WebSphere for its middleware needs. On the desktop, Honigwachs says that the unit plans to offer either Red Hat or Ubuntu. “The advantage of having both Red Hat desktops and servers is the ability to have a single management tool. But in government there is a preference for Ubuntu. We like Ubuntu and we have good quality skills on Ubuntu,” he says referring to the likes of the recently-appointed Ross Addis. A long-time Linux advocate, Addis was instrumental in establishing Impi Linux - both the original version and later the Ubuntu-based version.