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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.
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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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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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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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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
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.
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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.
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"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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.
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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.