The South African government faces benefits and challenges in the implementation of open source software.
This is according to Envir Fraser, manager for research and development at the Meraka Institute SA.
Speaking at the seventh annual African Computing and Telecommunications Summit held in Sandton this week, Fraser said there had been major progress and challenges as the government implemented open source software.
He highlighted the formation of various open source task teams, the Go-Open Source campaigns and the State IT Agency`s adoption of open source for some of its e-government initiatives.
"The Meraka Institute has used open source in two areas: the OpenPhone project, which provides communities with call centres to access information from government; and the Digital Doorway, a project that aims to train and develop new science and technology specialists using kiosks.
"Without such initiatives there can be no real progress. But challenges still remain. These include the need to grow and understand the technology."
Fraser noted that there is still a major challenge in the distribution of open source for the public sector.
"There is no real process to evaluate open source in local government and there are no proposals on the appropriate platforms that can be used. The local government has to figure out how to standardise the adoption of different services into a single view for citizens without having to use different software platforms."
Fraser said SA must face up to these challenges and overcome them so that the country can become an international player.
He concluded that open source should be used as it makes business sense. "It is a real value driver in government as it can meet their value proposition. The challenge is the skills needed to support government projects."
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