The City of Cape Town and the State IT Agency (SITA) plan to jointly develop an open source solution to replace the PALS system used by most of the country`s municipalities to manage their libraries.
City of Cape Town CIO Nirvesh Sooful says a memorandum of understanding is being worked out between the city and SITA to share the costs of developing the new system that is expected to save millions of rands in the long-term.
SITA is the South African licence holder for PALS (Project for Automated Library Service - a system that was originally developed by the University of Minnesota). The City of Cape Town pays SITA about R2.5 million annually in transaction fees, which includes the licence use and the maintenance of the system.
"We have worked out that the development costs of a new open source system would be between R3 million and R4 million, and so the annual savings should cover our costs alone. However, we would like to spread these costs as far as possible and allow for the whole country to benefit," Sooful says.
The City of Cape Town has 97 libraries that are managed using the PALS system which runs on Unisys mainframe computers.
"Another cost saving is that because this system will probably run on Linux it means that servers rather than mainframe computers can be used," Sooful says.
Last month an Open Source Competency Centre was opened by the City of Cape Town to help develop the necessary skills needed by the municipality and local industry to competently manage and implement such projects.
"What we really need are large projects such as this to lend credibility to the region as a centre for software development excellence," Sooful says.
He says skills shortage is not unique to open source software as the municipality struggles to find the necessary capacity with proprietary software as well.
SITA has already stated it would prefer to go open source in an attempt to cut down on licence fees it pays to vendors. For instance, 90% of central and local government PCs use Microsoft hardware and the savings on licences could run into billions of rands.
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