I'm rarely impressed by information in press releases. I use press releases because sometimes there's a nugget of useful information among with all the fluff. For example, one that crossed my desk this week begins:

" [Major U.S. company] announced today that it is advancing its position as a biometrics solutions provider by enhancing its portfolio of identity management products. The comprehensive Identity Management portfolio broadens [the company]'s commitment to help governments evolve to next generation ePassports and National ID cards to help deliver safer travel worldwide."

Next week, the company will tackle curing cancer.

But occasionally there is a press release that makes me pause and think. Another one that crossed my desk this week was like that. Even better, it was about Novell - but it wasn't from Novell!

The press release extensively quoted New Zealand Green Party IT spokesperson Metiria Turei. Well, it was released by the Green Party. But who would expect that a political party, especially one concerned mostly with ecology, would have an IT spokesperson?

In fact, Turei was commenting on the software ecology and a recent agreement between Novell and the New Zealand government to adopt and expand the government's use of non-proprietary, open-source software. Displaying a very good working knowledge of the open-source movement, Turei's quoted as saying: "Clearly much will be made of the money that can be saved by moving away from inflexible licensing requirements, but, IMHO, the most important part of this deal is the opportunity for agencies to embrace the increased reliability, security and flexibility of open source. In turn, the economy of scale and credibility provided by the government choosing open source should go some way to increasing its use in New Zealand generally, which in turn will start to roll back the virus-vulnerable Microsoft monoculture on Kiwi desktops."

(An aside: Do you suppose she actually said "IMHO" and if she did, did she say the phrase "In my humble opinion" or spell it out the letters? I very much believe that no one actually says the words attributed to them in press releases!)

In fact, this is very good news for Novell as was the recent announcement that the State of Massachusetts would only use software applications conforming to the Open Document standard for file formats (Microsoft Office doesn't conform).

While neither of these announcements directly sells any NetWare, GroupWise or ZENworks licenses - and, in fact, could be seen as limiting their future sales - anything that helps Novell's bottom line can only be good news for those who use the company's networking and productivity products. So it really is good news. There is one downside, though. The New Zealand government agency that Novell signed the deal with is Inland Revenue. Do we really cheer when the tax collector chooses more secure, more reliable software and operating systems?

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To contact Dave Kearns:

Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be found here.