Open Source Africa

Toucan Sam writes, "This could be of some interest to those who see the Linux community as being reserved for the first world exclusively." This doesn't just apply to Africa, but it's good to see that some people are thinking internationally.

Comments

Linux gaining momentum in South Africa

[mav[LAG]]

This article makes some good points. Certainly very few of us in Africa can afford the kind of hardware and pipes that we see reviewed in U.S. magazines all the time.
Just to put some things in perspective:

* South Africa has more telephone lines than the rest of Africa put together yet our national telephone penetration is about 8 per 100 inhabitants.
* A 64 kilobit permanent connection to the Net here costs roughly $1000 per month.
* The telephone operator is a government-enforced monopoly which is partly owned by SBC and Telekom Malaysia
* The exchange rate of the South African Rand to the U.S. $ is about 6:1

What has all this to do with software? Quite a bit actually. The more costs you can get rid of the better, and Linux has shown itself time and again in this market to be cheaper, less expensive to run and completely free from the local piracy issues we read about on a more or less permanent basis here. This is also an extremely price-sensitive market, almost but not quite as sensitive as India.
Currently the most IT spend in the country is done by the top 100 companies but that is swinging quickly to the hundreds of thousands of SMEs. When they take the biggest piece of the IT spending pie, then Linux will become an even more popular choice for those businesses.
Microsoft in South Africa is a pretty slick operation but they've made their cock-ups. I sat in on a seminar for teachers once when the local MS salesperson threatened them all with death unless they paid full price for NT, Office and some other products. There were quite a few Linux converts that day :)
Check out this site for the local Linux umbrella body which IMHO is doing an excellent job of promoting the OS. As an example, South Africa's equivalent of Comdex attracted about 50 000 visitors last year. The local Linux lads managed to sell in the region of 15 000 RedHat and Suse distros during the show - which means nearly 1 in 3 visitors walked away with Linux on CD.