Mandrakesoft Announces Agreement with French Ministry of Education and Research for Distribution of Products and Services to Higher Education Institutions

Mandrakesoft has announced an agreement with the French Ministry of Education and Research that allows the distribution of its line of products and services to Higher Education institutions throughout France.

The agreement also makes it easy for students and workers from these institutions to purchase Mandrakesoft products for their private use. From now on, computing departments of universities and research institutions will have the ability to tap into Mandrakesoft's portfolio of products and services for their software needs. Mandrakelinux products cover needs from the desktop (with the Powerpack) to critical infrastructure functions (with the Multi Network Firewall).

The Multi Network Firewall operating system is able to control access to both an organisation's private intranet and the public internet. Mandrakesoft products are part of the software library which has been selected to modernize the infrastructure of France's education system. As well as the applications themselves, Mandrakesoft will deliver technical support and training to staff. A spokesman for the ministry explained that the agreement aims to encourage the use of software solutions that are based on open standards and can be easily integrated into public standards-driven infrastructures. Students, particularly in computing courses, engineering schools and research departments, are among the groups the most accustomed to using open source software. Many researchers already use open source applications for scientific tasks. Familiarizing students with Linux during their education will further foster the building of a knowledge society based on open technologies in a heterogeneous computing environment. The catalog of software covered by the agreement includes the newly released Corporate Server and Corporate Desktop, two applications that enable universities and research bodies to build a stable yet flexible infrastructure, immune to viruses.