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SA govt lags open source trends


Cape Town, 01 Aug 2006

The South African government is behind the curve in a global trend towards open source software (OSS), the Gartner conference in Cape Town has heard.

Gartner research VP Andrea Di Maio told the symposium yesterday that, while the public sector globally had seen an increase in interest in OSS in the past two years, the South African government had yet to formulate a strategy that addressed the risk implications.

However, a comprehensive strategy that addressed such concerns could give non-proprietary software a foothold in the country. This could see SA joining the ranks of areas such as the US, Europe and Asia, which were investigating migration.

Already, OSS is making its presence known. In 2004, the entire software market was worth $282 billion. In 2009, it is expected to be at $589 billion. But, from only a 5% share in 2004, OSS and services are expected to take as much as 20% away from traditional software by 2009, a figure that grows to 24% the following year, he said.

The initial moves to investigate open source in the public sector, about three years ago, were born out of concerns over fixed-term software licences, Microsoft anti-trust cases, a desire to pass benefits onto local communities rather than global corporations, efficiency and maturity in the industry, he said.

Countries in this first phase, which occurred between 2003 and 2005, examined open source from the perspective of emotion, indifference or interest. However, the global situation is now dominated by a sense of what Di Maio calls "realism".

Countries such as the US, some in Europe and Asia are either investigating moving to OSS, or already implementing the software. SA, however, is still at the first stage.

When Munich made the decision to move its entire 14 000 PC operation to open source recently, it calculated both the visible software costs as well as intangible costs such as the impact on IT security and concluded that open source was cheaper.

Open source could bring these and other benefits to SA, said Di Maio. A move towards open source, he said, could prove to be a catalyst to developing skills, and possibly denting the skills shortage in the industry.

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