http://www.verivox.de/News/ArticleDetails.asp?aid=47952&pm=1

(pressebox) Stuttgart, 30.03.2007 - Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced together with IBM and VDEL, a leading IT services distribution company in Eastern Europe and Russia, that state certification has been awarded by the Russian Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEK) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on various IBM solutions. Russian Government institutions can now use IBM System x, IBM BladeCenter, IBM System p, IBM System i and IBM System z servers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Following the joint efforts of IBM, Red Hat and VDEL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS and WS 4 Update 1 + Audit Pack 1 has been certified on all IBM hardware platforms to the EAL4 and UDF4 levels.

This specific Russian security certification allows Red Hat Enterprise Linux, running on IBM servers, to be used for work with confidential data within government bodies in the country. The process of certification involved recompilation, analysis of related documentation and all aspects of development, testing and support for the product that was performed by the Center for Security of Information (CBI). With the open source software, CBI had to rebuild over 700 packages to determine that the binaries are 100 percent produced from the corresponding source code.

Very cool, Open source would be a great new alternative for the Russian agencies to evaulate against the other platforms whatever they are, this news also brings new credibility or recognition to the Red Hat platform.