The Guardian : Raising the platform
Interesting piece in the Guardian entitled “Raising the platform” discussing HP’s National Identification System (NIS).
To quote :
HP also claims NIS has been developed in Europe. It requires a wide range of software, including digital certificates and databases, plus hardware that ranges from biometric sensors (face and fingerprint scanners, etc) to smartcard printers. Much of this comes from European partners such as Wisekey, Datacard, Monet+ and Hermes Softlab. But what has surprised some people is that HP has built NIS on Microsoft.net software rather than open source and Sun's Java. HP is, after all, one of Linux's main supporters, and -according to IDC research - is now the biggest supplier of Linux servers.
However, Forrester Research reckons Microsoft.net has overtaken Java, and has two thirds of the public sector market against J2EE's one third. HP's security and defence systems director, Jim Ganthier, says the company will supply whatever governments mandate, but adds: "The bulk of the requests we're getting are Microsoft."
It seems not too many Linux hackers are developing large-scale national security systems on their kitchen tables, and even if they were, governments tend to balk at the idea that, in Ganthier's words, "they've got my code".
In October I gave the welcome address at the HP's NIS Seminar held in Sophia Antipolis at the HP/Microsoft joint .NET Solution Center. The "NIS backgrounder" document produced for that event is available here and explains the role of the other partners, WISeKey, Datacard, HERMES SoftLab and MONET+.