A new article on The Inquirer takes a look at SuSE/IBM's recent CC Enterprise Assurance certification, and compares/contrasts it with Red Hat/Oracle's similar attempt at certification.
However, the article goes on to further discuss the value of these certifications, pointing out that:
As we've recently seen, these certifications don't guarantee that these platforms are secure. These Microsoft "certified" operating systems have just been compromised on a massive international scale by the "LoveSAN" or "MSBlaster" worm. Microsoft has had to front-end its "WindowsUpdate" site with about 15,000 Akamai servers this weekend (and very ironically, those Akamai servers are all running Linux). This vulnerability is even suspected as the root cause of Thursday night's extensive power blackout throughout the Northeast and Upper Midwest US and extending into Canada, as this SecurityFocus posting posits. At this juncture, one might really wonder how much the DoD formal certifications are actually worth, in terms of effective IT infrastructure security.
It also goes on to discuss recent U.S. DoD problems relating to Linux vs. Microsoft, and even political bias against Europen vendors. Overal, a very good read.