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South African Gov't Declared An Open Source Zone
fungai writes "The Business Day reports that the South African government has decided to adopt open source software and develop support programs with local research institutes and universities. The CIO of the State IT Agency says: 'The logic for open-source is so compelling that after a year of debates we decided to stop talking and declare government an open-source zone.'"
What other Western country is ruled by a powerful religious lobby?
Germany. Well, maybe not so much at the federal level currently, but consider this: the popular right-wing party is called the Christian Democratic Union; you have to declare your religious affiliation to your employer so that if you belong to either of the two major Christian churches the federal government will withhold taxes that go to those fine organizations; also if you're affiliated with those organizations, then religious education is mandatory in public schools, which, by the way, are generously equipped with crosses, but which ban teachers who insist on wearing a head scarf, because that is perceived to be an expression of religious belief that's inappropriate in school.
Marklar: marklar
"South Africa has among the highest rates of violent crime in the world. Calculated per 100 000 of the population in 1995, only two countries had higher murder rates - Colombia and Swaziland. The US has a murder rate eight times lower than that of South Africa. Rape figures are the highest in the world, as are South Africa's reported cases of robbery and violent theft."
Real progressive.
As a South African I am fully aware that we have good programmers and a lot of open source followers.I myself use Linux and FreeBSD as much as possible. Even at home. The rest of the world usually find it very weird to hear that we even have computers. We might not be the US , but our cities look just like any other city in Europe. But with our budget and problems, we need to take steps like this to save costs.This is excellent and I'm very glad to hear that our govenment made that choice.
The funny thing is that recently Microsoft offered a couple of schools (in rural areas where they just recently got running water) *free* copies of MS-Office, but the government made their calculations and realized that the schools would not be able to afford the licenses for Windows and the computers, so they said.Thanks , but no thanks. That was funny to see MS's publicity stunt backfire like that.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
Another example of an american not knowing about "the rest of the world".
This is *not* AFRICA we're talking about; it is "South Africa", not your average african country. South Africa has one of the highest GDP per capita in the world. In fact, several years back, they were #1! Diamonds are really worth something.
So, chances are, the average south african is richer than the average american.
This story at kde.dot.org tells about an effort to translate KDE into all seven official languages in South Africa. No way any commercial program (like windows) is going to go through that effort.
But open source software allows you to do it yourself. KDE is a nice one in that regard because they have good tools for translations and a good process for dealing with it. Before a big release is made, there's plenty of time for the translators to do their job. There is a "string freeze" to allow every translation to get completed.
(Other big projects probably 've got something similar, KDE is just an example where I know it worked).
So: You want the functionality badly? You pay for it (with time or money) and there is nothing to stop you from getting it! Nice, that open source software.
Reinout
Reinout van Rees
Unfortunatley, you're wrong. I'm a South African, and the masses over here does not have the level of skills they have in India or China. The education programs are lacking too much. The privileged few, sure, they are well trained at top universities. The rest can hardly afford a computer.
Fungai
Now start adding up the cost per server. CALs, terminal services licences, Window 2K Advanced Server, etc all add up.
South Africa's government is not just choosing this as a "disadvantaged" nation - they actually have some major industry down there and the government is quite well funded (diamonds, gold mining, etc.) Having lived there for a couple years, I found it is far less third world than you would think - there are definitely impoverished areas, but there are also a lot of very educated well off people backing this decision.
That said, this does not surprise me that they would do this. The So. Africans viewed the American computer industry quite negatively - all of our companies (IBM, et al) pulled out due to the apartheid situation (which is ironic as they were the companies hiring diversity - a topic for another day) and left them in the lurch. Some have probably returned now, but those negative feelings toward "Western" companies remain. So it does not surprise me at all they would go open source.
"their governments continued to cut taxes" - I'm not sure what you are implying with this, but government tax revenues have gone _UP_ every time a significant tax cut has been issued, because of how much it stimulated the economy.
Engineering and the Ultimate