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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.'"
It will be interesting to see what kinds of programs they come up with and how soon other countries follow suite.
~.Evanrude
However, Microsoft's response was the kicker.
"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?"
I almost fell off my chair laughing. It's interesting seeing them confuse state operations and business...Maybe they've been suckling (sp?) on the US government a bit too hard?
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
If totally open-source were good for the U.S. gov't (and you have to look at the whole picture, not just the fact that it would be good for Linux :), then I'm sure the bill would have come up at some point.
Remember that the U.S. gov't is very different from the ZA gov't in terms of money to buy proprietary software, and control they have over the owners of said proprietary software. (Though with the amount of respect Microsoft is giving their conviction, this might not be true!!)
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
If America in the 1800s were like America now, we'd have a world-renouned gunsmith academy, but no such thing as interchangeable parts. Automobile manufacturing would be a highly skilled and paid industry.
People with money now see too much risk in using open source software. They've been fed too much FUD from microsoft and they keep buying their software, becuase if it ain't broken, they don't want to fix it.
Well, that's an easy one: the high school and college kids who were watching the developers will take their places. Duh.
Yes, it was certainly innovative when the South African government declared that AIDS doesn't exist and is just a figment of the imagination. Presumably they used the same sort of 'logic' to arrive at this decision.
(Note: this isn't a flame or a troll, just the obersvations of a South African living in the US)
It appears that, in general, South Africa has leapt way ahead of the US in a large number of policy areas, not just Open Source. They've got fundamental protections in their constitutions which are significantly stronger than those in the US (for example, you can't discriminate based on percieved sexuality, domestic partnerships are law, with same sex marriages in the works, etc.) Now, to be fair, 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, but it does seem odd that SA is apparently overtaking the US in terms of the general "cluefulness" of the administration.
Microsoft is still trying to figure out web services and .NET. The first version of .NET has a lot of improvements over IIS 3 and 4, but it still isn't enterprise class. For small and medium business with minimal needs, it's fine. For serious enterprise apps, it's still has a long way to go.
If microsoft can't get windows and .NET up to enterprise class in 5 years, they can forget about it happening. I know first hand many large financial corps are moving towards clustered/grid approach to next generation platform, so there's only a small window for microsoft to break in. If they delay be 2 years or more, linux will become the defacto clustering platform for PC hardware.
(1) Open-source isn't a "sustainable business model?" So, according to Microsoft, forcing annual upgrades and software subscription on businesses IS a sustainable business model? In the now-infamous Peru letter, didn't Microsoft state that sales make up only a small portion of the overall software cost -- support, integration, and customization make up a far larger percent. That sounds like a sustainable business model to me. Being a US school district that received an audit threat letter from their marketing department, we sure aren't impressed with Microsoft's business model anymore. That's why we switched to StarOffice on 1000 PCs last fall (grand total cost, $25.00)
(2) What happens when "the developers
(3) What happens when "the developers
The Microsoft FUD machine is really revving up
especially considering the high costs of HIV/AIDS treatments, anything this government can do to same money in sensible ways is a much, much bigger plus than merely its effect of the open source community, or /. world. People are dying at incredible rates because of a lack of education (costs money) and treatment (costs money).
Excellent idea.
The average African does not make the same amount of money as the average American.
So when you say stuff about people in Africa somehow getting rich off of windows programs, you would be right if this were happening in 1995-99, but its 2003, theres no longer a shortage of programmers, the supply of programmers are endless and the supply of software is limited, at least in africa where the people cannot afford the software.
Their best solution is to develop their own software using their own labor, and then they can build the technology they need to export to the USA and thats how they can REALLY make money.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Africa needs an economy. They have more than enough workers, what they need is infastructure, they need an OS, they need plenty of software which they can develop on their own considering they have unlimited people power,
Its almost like China or India, yes they can make money making Windows software but they would make ALOT more money if they didnt have to pay for licenses, this would allow them to advance in the information age faster because even with a poor economy they'd be able to compete with and even surpass us in terms of software development and engineering.
Robotics, AI, and alot of computer devices they create could be exported giving them a similar economy to that of Japan. Japan currently sells playstation 2 and electronics devices which require alot of programming, Africa has the ability to have an economy like this easily.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I'm sorry, but I think it's the control owners of said proprietary software have over them that has prevented more open discussion/acceptance of open source software...
/. comments could ever do.
Get OpenOffice to spell-check around em-dashes and placement of bookmarks in PDFs, and you'll do more to help OSS and harm MS than any number of irate
Then again, I just downloaded OoO 1.0.2... maybe it works now... (yeah, right...)
That makes perfect sense. I worked in a government research office while going to college. In my experience, governments (and any large organization given enough time) are filled with inefficiency, ineptitude, and office politics. One person continually came to work drunk and usually padded his time card by several hours a day, it took years before they finally threatened to fire him, at which point he retired. While it is nice to spend two months trying to explain to a "system administrator" how to install a perl CGI script, I would rather be productive with my time. We had a single processor AIX box running DCE just because it was standard, and 40 x-windows users connecting to this box over a 10baseT network. At home I had a 100 megabit network and a dual celeron 400 mhz with a 20 gig hard drive and 128 MB ram. At work I had a Pentium 90 with 48 MB ram and 1 gig hard drive.
Open source makes a lot of sense if you have substantial in-house unix expertise, or if you want IBM to make a fortune on support fees, but if you want an efficient organization, linux (or even open source) isn't the end-all, be-all solution, it might work for part of the problem, but do you really want to write drivers for that gas chromograph spectrometer with a HPIB interface card and the other 20 specialized instruments in the lab? The manufacturers barely support windows, let alone any form of unix.
Look at the problem and find the right solution for the problem, don't choose a technology and try to wedge it in somewhere because it looks cool. Unix solves a number of problems well, but so does OSX, Windows 2000, Minix, and even DOS. Don't just choose a solution because it's trendy.
k.. im really tired and I cant think that good, so this wont be very clearly written how long do you think it will be before we will see more and more state and local goverments doing similar things? There is a HUGE deficit and money shortage, and many groups are looking to cut costs. The public school system in my area has to cut there budget by 2 million dollars(the latest proposal was to cut media aids). Ive got a feeling that more and more people are going to be looking towards open source solutions in the near future.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Why? Government universities have a long track record of giving their software back to the community. Government agencies inside the US were actively improving Linux before they were stopped due to lobbying. The government of Germany is funding work that is going into KDE which will be available to everyone.
I don't see any evidence at all that governments aren't willing to widely share code. Their perspective is likely any of the other major players: if they don't share the code then they have no chance of getting the code in the main tree and they have repatch every new release which is an impossible amount of work.
Being a South African myself, I just hope this isn't another one of our Governments tricks at appearing to be 1st world and 'up to date/ahead of' 1st world countries.
Whilst people in our country remain illiterate, homeless and diseased on a vast scale, the government implements such things such as this, instead of facing up to our most immediate problems.
They implement laws such as 'no smoking in public places', yet fail to curb the serious offences, such as murder, rape and robbery.
They implement grand new schemes, such as this Open Source 'initiative' when millions are without homes, clean water or electricity.
It's just lip-service - they can pat themselves on the back and say "Look, we're just as good as the 1st world" while ignoring the real issues that face our country.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I was wondering how much that really is. Wandering over to XE.COM, one US Dollar is equal to 8.9 South Africa Rand. The article's writing style seems a bit odd to me, but maybe that's how reporting is done in South Africa. Quoting....
Now I'm wondering if "R3bn" is (roughly) equivilant to 337 million US dollars. Suppose the average PC gets $600(usd) installed on it, in windows, office, and a couple other apps. I just pulled that $600 out of a hat, but it seems a reasonably conservative (high) estimate of the amount of proprietary software you'd purchase per machine, on average.
That'd put their annual software purchasing at (approx) 561600 PCs per year, or 1.12 million PCs in use on a 2-year Microsoft "software assurance" upgrade cycle.
Is that reasonable, or did I add something up wrong?
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I have lived in South Africa for almost all my life and four years ago, got out of there and have moved to Sydney, Australia (like most who can, do!). The primary reason for this was the amount of corruption going on, largely due to the shocking government in South Africa (it's disheartening to say this, but SA is going like the rest of Africa).
The RSA Government has obviously recognised OSS software as a means to reduce costs which is excellent news for them, and good for the OSS community, but it won't be sustainable for very long. Professionals are leaving RSA in droves and whilst it's cheap for the government to hire such people to manage Linux systems, corners will be cut everywhere and the South African government's greed will simply make the project fail (OSS software is good, but often requires a little more expertise to implement than other solutions which is ok in almost all circumstances).
In the end, the corrupt government will screw things up so bad that they can't even afford to maintain even OSS systems.
As a South African business & games software retailer, I can tell you Microsoft is one of the few companies in the country who refuse to adjust their software prices based on the country they are dealing with. For example the Age of Mythology retails on average here at R 545 (exchange rate R8.80 = $1.00) Whereas a company such as Electronic Arts average PC Games retails for R 299 or even lower in SA. Taking Microsoft pricing policy forward to their business software and licenses, one can see they are horribly overpricing themselves in a country who can ill afford their high prices.
They probably won't, but that's expected. Maybe one day everybody will use Linux and most of our software will be open source, but I don't expect Joe and Jane User to start sending me patches. Right through the history of open source software, the answer has always been "if you want something, do it yourself". That worked because if you were using open source software, you were probably also a programmer.
In the future, that won't work, because they'll just be users who even if they wanted to help out could not, because they don't have the skills.
So the idea that if you use open source software you should contribute back is unsustainable really. I mean I use the road network, but I'm not expected to take part in filling holes, that's somebody elses job. Via taxes I pay them to do that for me.
I think in the future maybe when users outnumber developers in linuxland you'll start seeing people scanning bugzillas for high voted bugs and offering to fix them in return for cash - you want CYMK in the GIMP? How much is it worth to you (and others). So, although I expect the majority of the work would still be done by volunteers, some of the other things would be contributed to by pure users, perhaps business and govt amongst them.
I've often thought I'd try it after I leave university, in about 3/4 years. But I don't really know what the user:developer ratio will be then, and I wouldn't want to ask money for a feature when probably most of the people who'd contribute were themselves volunteer developers. That'd feel wrong. So, we'll have to see how it goes.
Anyway, my point was that in the future very few users will actually be able to contribute back patches or docs or whatever directly, so I should think economic models will arise that let them do it indirectly. Governments probably will contribute back in this way.
Just look at IE. It's been almost two years since IE 6 came out, and that was just a minor upgrade over 5.0 and 5.5. When Netscape ruled the browser kingdom, IE was progressing at a rapid pace. Now if Mozilla, Safari, Opera, etc, make serious dents in market share, watch IE development take off again...
Competition is a wonderful thing.