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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.'"
"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"
You have to love it when governments take a "why not" approach to innovation. It's something a lot of USA busineses (and government entities) could take a lesson from.
Not.
Considering that the country's flock-of-apes substitute for a government has scared away any commercial interests, and that the Soviet Union and the KGB is no longer around to fund the ANC goons.
Another country down the African drain.
> 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.
Someone must not have found it too terribly compelling, or else they wouldn't have spent a whole year debating it.
At any rate, it's easy to imagine that billg is packing his bags for another emergency handout run right now.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I am very pleased at the news that open source software will be used in SA, but it's certainly not amazing. What's incredible is that more governments haven't switched to open source. There is excellent software out there being given away for free, but people are still using inferior software and paying money for it. It only stands to reason that eventually all smart governments will adopt the 'don't pay for what we could get for free' policy. The Microsoft reaction seemed entirely panic-driven(giving software to schools), and their argument is weak. They are right about one thing though, open source software in itself(i.e. just the software) isn't a sustainable business model. Of course that's completely irrelevant. What's relevant is that the software continues to advance in leaps and bounds, is free and is showing no signs of stopping. Let the open source companies worry about business models, I'm only concerned with my free software that I'm free to change however I like.
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From the point of a single product, they have a good point. Eventually, the programmer will/might realize that he could have written the same program for Windows, and have made himself a living writing programs (outside of the rat race, might I add)
At that point, the product will be left hanging.
So? What if Microsoft decided that they want to move on an abandon a product? You're screwed there.
At least with OSS you can just contract out someone to continue the work.
Any many OSS projects are paid for directly or indirectly by various business entities anyway.
That depends on the reason for writing it in the first place.. was it to do something they needed done? Do they need it to make their own buieness function? Was it something just for fun?
Or hey maybe they were making money off it.. many developers are actually payed by one copany or another. Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, IBM and connectiva all pay developers.
Then again so what if it does get dropped? It's not that hard to hire someone else to fix it.
Then again it's not as if I've never had commercial products simply discontinued on a whim.
At least with Open Source you have options after.
"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," says Moseki.
If it was so compelling why did it take a year of debates? Why did the debates not come across this compelling solution, and have to stop, not decide, and just choose one?
Maybe the person was misquoted but it sounds a bit illogical.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Can we expect to see Bill Gates making a trip to South Africa now? After India just said they were leaning towards it, MS wandered over there carpetbagging "Free" software. I garuntee that within the week, there'll be an MS rep on the Dark Continent preaching the joys of their software. Let the countdown begin.
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Yes the programmer might have realised that he/she could have written the same programme for Windows and then he/she will breathe a sigh of relief that they didn't. Not all developers are after the almighty dollar, nor are they willing to work with inferior tools.
The other point you seem to miss is the fact that OSS software can lead to job creation, need a custom module for Apache? Hire a developer, need a more secure version of Sendmail? Hire a developer. The code is there for anyone to use, as opposed to waiting for the proprietry code to be updated and even then there is no garauntee that the new version will meet your needs.
You can't count every one of a billion Africans as a potential programmer. Not everyone has electricity, for one thing. Of those who do, not everyone can afford a computer -- and there aren't a lot of libraries with public Internet access.
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The Navy/Marine corp is presently going in the opposite direction. They are launching a large scale contract (NMCI) that restricts all Navy IT to MS and MS solutions. No room for further innovations with other platforms or the application of appropiate technology to the task, just a rosey pink homogeneous MS world. Under the new system you are not even allowed to connect a BSD, Linux, embedded network device or even a MAC machine to the network anywhere.
At the Navy labs, this one size fits all approach is even more short sighted and foolish. The upper echelon has yet to catch on that the network is the backbone or the infrastructure that enables an ever increasing plethora of monitoring systems, data acquisition and control systems, collabration and communication mechanisms, etc. As more and more devices become Web enabled the Navy has effectively locked itself out in the cold and crawled in bed with built in obsolesce - not to mentioned left itself vulnerable to an attack or virus that would spead like wild fire in a homogeneous network.
for example, you can't discriminate based on percieved sexuality, domestic partnerships are law, with same sex marriages in the works, etc
Good, so I can get a tax discount for marrying two women, or even my dog now, right?
Seriously, I'm not trolling, but to me the entire concept of marraige tax benefits is for the purpose of having a family, which science has dictated quite plainly that it takes a male and female. Now, if two people, or even three people want to be life partners, that's their choice. I just don't see why they should get a "family" tax benefit.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I feel it's nonsense to declare any governemnt department or private institution an 'open source' zone, if the implication is that only open source solutions will be considered.
What happens when they need functionality that the open source world doesn't offer. I'm thinking of things like the scalability and availability features you get from the big Unix guys (and no, sticking 100 Dells together is not always the answer for big systems). What about when something like SAP, Oracle Apps, Siebel, etc, etc is required?
Support issues and costs are not instantly solved just because you can look at the source code. That is utterly irrelevant to most IT managers. The last thing govt IT workers I know want to be told is that they no longer need that support contract - they can just look at the code man'. That simply doesn't hack it in a large number of situations. If it does work, then use it, but it shouldn't be the sole policy.
No IT solution should be dismissed out of hand, whether closed or open.
It seems every time a "big time" Open Source story like this appears on Slashdot, all the posters turn into blind zealots.
Sure, this is great news - but that's no reason to discount what Microsoft is saying.
Microsoft may be guilty of a lot of things, but sofar I agree with the "paying the bills" statement. There's scarce few major success story from any developers coding Open Source software alone - but yet there are many successful proprietary developers.
It seems to me that Open Source software works best when the collaborators are working on behalf of different companies on the one piece of software. That is, the businesses themselves are not reliant on the software, but the collaborative development benefits all those involved.
Hmm I disagree. Companies spend a lot of money of software. Both buying and making inhouse software. If there was a business case for modifying some OS software (e.g. it is projected to save X thousands of dollars) I see no reason why the company would hesitate.
And companies can afford it - the investment is usually worth it.
Is this move by South Africa, People's Rep. China, et al. really a big win for the Open Source movement, or is it just governments taking free stuff?
Maybe I'm being a cynic and/or misunderstanding, but I'm not expecting some of these governments to actually contribute anything back to OSS. I half expect some of them to end up violating any licensing the code is released under.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
"If microsoft can't get windows ... up to enterprise class"
Linux's clustering capabilities are indeed better than those of Windows, but only in the engineering and scientific calculation space.
You seem to be overlooking the enterprise database space, where Microsoft has thoroughly smacked-down the competition, both in overall performance and price-performance.
For "enterprise" computing, what is more important: scientific calculations or databases? I think you will find the latter more critical to the overwhelming majority. Many, if not most, enterprises do not perform the kinds of engineering and scientific calculations that grid computing targets, while most would be hard-pressed to find a company that does not use a database.
I'm not trying to ridicule the apparent success of linux in this space, but don't delude yourself into thinking that this is the be-all and end-all of computing just yet.
You're trolling.
Nevertheless:
When you're the government, and you need a solution to deploy to a five thousand desktops, the money you spend on licenses could just as well be spent on OSS development. Then, when you deploy to ten thousand desktops, licenses cost nothing.
The programmer *is* making a living writing programs: He's an employee of the South African government, rather than Microsoft. His spending power and expertise improves the economy of South Africa, not Washington state. If he quits, hire and train someone else. It's still a better investment than software licenses.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
"Speaking from a publicity standpoint, South Africa seems to have little credibility in the world these days."
:o/
Unlike... say... The United States of America!
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
If were're talking about Africa as a whole (rather than just SA, which this story is about) then I'd say Africa is _much_ worse off than China.
Africa still has a fair number of extremely corrupt governments and civil unrest. Chinese peasants are poor, but they don't have to worry about thugs coming through their villages and spraying the buildings with gunfire like in the Congo.
Lots of reason to hope, of course. Good government in Ghana. South Africa is making progress. But I think China and India are much more likely to become world leaders in the next 50 years.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
It's not just tax benefits. With marriage comes something like 2743 rights in the state of Virginia (your mileage will vary state to state) including shared insurance benefits, hospital visitation rights (which is a big one), power of attourney rights, etc. Quite frankly, the tax benefit doesn't make such a huge difference when you've got another mouth (or two or three) to feed.
- I haven't been back in SA since the '94 elections, so I don't know how much of the new government's legislation has made it into actual practice
Ok, I'll fill you in. South Africa has perhaps the greatest divide between Law and Reality that has ever existed. Government wonks in gated communities debate protecting sexual orientation while half the nation live under the tyranny of warlords. There are whole cities in SA which, for all practical purposes, have no police presence. Expats like you talk about how great things are, but probably couldn't be paid enough to go back.It appears that the same thing is happening to "a lot". Deal with it. If you want to complain, why not go straight to the source and complain that "a lot" makes no sense as a term of magnitude? "a lot of wood" used to be a specific amount of wood, i.e. one lot. This was gradually perverted into meaning "any large quantity of...", and is now about as meaningful as "many". People used to complain about ye fuck-tardes who use "a lot" on its own, as in "I swear at people at lot". "A lot of what?" they asked.
HanzoSan claimed that the existence of a billion Africans meant that they had an unlimited base of programmers. I responded that there are other factors that exclude many people from being even potential programmers.
Any conclusion involving Americans exists only in your mind, not in my argument.
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Well both you and the original poster are guilty of misquoting. Here's the original. "It's a very popular technology today, but ultimately it's not a sustainable business model. What happens when the developers who find it exciting today move on to something which will pay the bills?" He's trying to cast fear and doubt on there being anyone to back your software "investment", if the developer loses interest. He's viewing the world through the "old model" point of view.. However OSS as you should have realized by now, doesn't play by the same rules. Having the source code puts control of the "investment" back in the hands of whomever holds it, not a company in Washington state. A successful OSS project is one who's code is being used, regardless of how much or how little. Not how much money the developers make:i.e. "successful proprietary developers." Also your "successful proprietary developers", have tied their "success" to a single point of failure. So Microsoft fortunes go, so theirs go. The governments and businesses who are giving OSS a try are simply breaking that link, and placing their success were it should have been all along. In their own hands.
You know why Microsoft's software is expensive?
First, 70% to 80% of Windows/Office is profit margin.
Then we have sales and marketing.
Then we have factories making CDs, packaging them up and sending them around the world where they are further distributed physically.
Then we have all those "features" like WPA, Palladium, copy protection, purposely breaking formats to force people to upgrade, etc. which are not really needed in an OSS product.
I'd be surprised if the cost to maintain Windows or Office is more than 2 or 3% of the retail price.
Just one single developer can maintain even a larger project (hell, Linus still maintains the Linux kernel mostly himself - in his spare time) and the same or (if the project is really huge) another one can add the features you want.
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.
This kind of measure dosn't tell you much about the typical person in South Africa. To find this out you'd be better off looking at median or mode figures for the population than the arithmetic mean.
How many vitamin A integrators will your government buy for the price of a M$ license? How many abused safe-homes can be financed for the price of a department upgrade to the latest & greatest WinXP? How many extra rural computer terminals can be deployed for the same investment and at what usaqe rate can they hit if they come in all the possible languages (people, the less educated especially, don't get the feeling they're being 'colonized' but rather treat the novelty as an 'extension' of their own culture)?
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Its amazing that a person like yourself can have such a profound opinion about a country which you abandoned 9 years ago just as these "progressive policies" were being applied.
Who gives you the right to make such a statement. You disgust me!
By that argument, why should a childless hetrosexual couple have a tax benefit? Or indeed, why should a homosexual couple with an adopted child not get a benefit? In the UK we have a benefit which is paid out to parents (all parents) per child. That seems like a sensible approach if you really are concerned about "making families". On the other hand, if you're simply trying to attach some entirely false special meaning to a hetrosexual pairing then I'm afraid you're on to a loser.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
You, sir, are to stupid to live.
I have made money from OSS software (Apache licenced), if you can't, then too bad for you. Don't blame the rest of us for your own stupidity.
True, OSS won't build the next MSFT, but then again, who needs a huge corporation? It only takes freedom away for the grunts doing the coding.
So, unless you are Bill Gates that should not be a problem.
I pity you.
What bothers SA is that they buy licenses of software, but yet not one company develops software in SA. Using Open Source they are giving the chances to future generations of developers. In other words they are becoming self reliant.
Lets put it in their context. Would you not do the same? Would you not want to have your people be part of the digital revolution? Buying software does not make you part of that revolution.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Yes. I can't wait for Bill Gates to fly into ZA and announce that he's donating 50 bazillion Rand ($5000) to combat AIDS and 50 squillion ($5 million) to combat open source.
It's funny how the link he uses shows no results for linux. So your results show that microsoft beat linux but linux wasn't tested?
Also, if I recall, microsoft is one of the biggest sponsors of that organization.
Liberty.
So the people who managed the deployment were free? How about the user training? How about the lost productivity time as end users got used to the new app? How about the conversion problems on the few especially complex documents star office struggles with?
It's been said before, and here it is again... free software is only free if your time is.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Now this is a laugh when you think about it - if a government orders 10,000 copies of windows, what's the point of sending 10,000 copies of the same CD.
Here Open Source makes so much sense. Download one copy, or order one copy on CD and install it on as many computers as you would like. Logical and simple.
And why don't they have the level of skills? Is it possible one of the main reasons behind this is the financial cost involved? Surely the saving made by not buying proprietory software and going for Open Source alternatives allows a larger portion of the population to get involved in obtaining these skills because of the reduced costs.
Its the financial cost factor that's the barrier. Removing it or reducing it allows entry by more people. Certainly not all people, but more than before. Its progress.
So the people that previously couldn't afford a computer and its software but can afford just a computer -- isn't that an improvement? If you want to change an entire country, start with one person.
Enron. WorldCom.
Now this is a laugh when you think about it - if a government orders 10,000 copies of windows, what's the point of sending 10,000 copies of the same CD.
That's what they have site-licenses for.
First, 70% to 80% of Windows/Office is profit margin.
At the surface by quickly glancing at the SEC filings one would assume this to be true. Don't get me wrong, Windows/Office are HUGE cash cows, but read prior threads from a few months ago that explain why this is not a correct conclusion.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I'm not kidding. There ought to be a Federal law against this sort of thing, for government agencies. In the commercial world, when a company makes dumb technical decisions, in the worst case, it can go out of business. When the US Navy makes dumb technical decisions, it could literally cost people's lives, and affect national security.
This gives new meaning to phrases like "no-one ever got fired for buying IBM (or Microsoft)". No-one ever got killed by allowing heterogenous systems.