Johannesburg, 24 Jun 2005
The lack of Linux skills and education is hindering the move to Linux desktops in organisations, says Yossi Hasson, sales and marketing director at Synaq, a Linux support and services company.
Hasson says there is a need for improved Linux skills.
The Shuttleworth Foundation's tuXlab initiative is a good start but migration is slow and the labs are put up mainly in rural areas, says Hasson.
The level of Linux education and that of IT in general is low in SA, he adds.
He believes Linux training must be offered in the more established education institutions. The problem is that the institutions have invested in their current structures, so the benefits of moving to an open source platform need to be highlighted, he notes.
"If Linux training starts at the ground level it takes users through the whole change process; not only Linux but the whole IT infrastructure, so it empowers people because they need to understand networking and be able to configure mail servers, among other things.
"Because Windows is so simple, in a sense it is un-educating. Linux training empowers people as it allows interested students to go beyond just learning how to use the desktop applications."
In a Third World country, Linux will give the opportunity to level the playing field and bridge that divide, he adds.
Linux at work
Issues around integration, cost and need hamper the adoption of Linux desktops. It is costly because people need to be trained and there are integration issues because some of the in-house proprietary software only runs on a Windows platform, he notes.
In companies that house between 10 and 20 employees, it seems more is lost than gained by moving to Linux, says Hasson.
The move towards Linux desktops is also being stalled by the misunderstanding between what a Linux server and Linux desktop is.
There are so many flavours and Linux distributions that sometimes users don't always know what is being referred to, so the good and the bad of Linux are working against each other at the same time, Hasson says.
The government is pushing open source, especially with the South African Revenue Service (SARS) taking the Novell route, so there is a willingness among organisations to move to Linux. Linux server adoption, as in the SARS case, is simple, but organisations are more cautious when it comes to a Linux desktop shift, he says.
The hesitation exists because organisations don't know that Linux can offer the same functionality as a Windows desktop, with the recent Open Office 2 solution and the Evolution mail server as examples, says Hasson.
South Africans have grown up using Windows machines, so they do not know any better, he adds.
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