Sun's Mad Hatter chosen for Telstra's Linux switch

Telco to go for MS-Sun hybrid

By John Lettice • Get more from this author

Posted in Software, 18th September 2003 17:00 GMT

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Australian telco Telstra will be one of the first major customers to roll with Sun's Mad Hatter Linux desktop, according to a report in The Australian. Telstra has been trialling the product, released this week under the much more boring name of Sun Java Desktop, following its decision last year to investigate Linux systems as an alternative to Microsoft.

The company runs 45,000 desktops, and is shooting to cut up to $750 million from its annual IT budget of $1.5 billion. Which will be an impressive trick if it works.

Telstra CIO and self-confessed Scott McNealy fan Jeff Smith told the paper that the company's open source desktop environment would be Mad Hatter, and that he expected to have a TCO differential study of Linux, Mad Hatter and StarOffice over an equivalent Microsoft configuration by the end of October. The company intends to operate a hybrid Microsoft and Sun environment, which Smith says, interestingly, will involve interoperability between J2EE and .Net. We can't make up our minds whether it's Sun's techies or the Sun legal team that'll be more interested in how this pans out. ®

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