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SA's open source industry lags

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 10 Sept 2012

South Africa and Africa are two to five years behind the rest of the world in adopting vendor-supported open source software.

This is according to Jan-Jan van der Vyver, MD of Linux Warehouse, who says the rest of the world already understands that it makes more sense to buy a support subscription for open source software than a right-to-use licence for proprietary software.

From a vendor perspective, Van der Vyver adds, the main challenge in SA is keeping the developer community healthy and thriving, since this affects the ability to innovate and improve.

In order to raise awareness of vendor-supported open source software, ITWeb, in partnership with Linux Warehouse, today opened the Open Source Survey, which, Van der Vyver says, also seeks to reveal the state of adoption of vendor-supported open source software.

“Open source software is used in everything, from simple embedded systems, all the way through to massive data centres and supercomputers,” says Van der Vyver.

“For example, Android smartphones have taken over the world market; Red Hat has recently become a $1 billion company; and the majority of servers run on Linux. Even Apple uses an open source operating system as the core of their laptops, iPhones and iPads,” he adds.

In SA, says Van der Vyver, adoption is being spearheaded by the banking and telecommunications industries.

“These industries tend to have the highest demands for scalability, quality, cost cutting and support turnaround requirements, which makes vendor-supported open source a natural fit.”

Van der Vyver also notes that open source software avoids vendor lock-in to both hardware and software, bringing down the price of both.

“Consider Vyatta, a virtual network offering that allows customers a full firewall with deep packet inspection and intrusion prevention on simple x86 hardware, delivering greater performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional network hardware and software.

“This commoditising of the network is a big trend in software at the moment, being lead by open source offerings.”

Regarding security, Van der Vyver believes the quality of security on vendor-supported open source software is consistently higher than on propitiatory alternatives.

“Customers do not buy a right-to-use licence with vendor-supported open source software; instead, they buy a support subscription. This support subscription is a risk mitigation against bugs, including security leaks, where the vendors increase their profit by minimising the amounts of bugs and security leaks by decreasing the amount of support calls.”

He explains that this is in clear opposition to proprietary offerings, where vendors are motivated to sell a new licence, rather than patching exiting software as soon as possible, and some vendors even leave backdoors in their software.

“Vendor-supported open source software brings all the advantages of open source to the enterprise, together with meeting all the traditional enterprise requirements of a vendor,” he concludes.

Click here to complete the survey and stand a chance to win a Samsung Galaxy tablet.

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