Open source events like LinuxWorld, held at the Sandton Convention Centre last week, have expanded beyond the "geek zone".
They are attracting an increasing number of representatives from the business world, says Chris Pratt, manager of strategic initiatives for IBM Canada.
"More business people are attending these events to understand how open source can be incorporated into their organisations to save money, improve stability and help create new business models," he explains.
According to Pratt, companies are becoming less concerned about whether there is a large, formal, bricks and mortar institution behind a product or service. Instead, success is being measured by how many people are using it and how well it works.
Pratt says SA should embrace the opportunity presented by open source because it enables companies to prove and test new lines of business by providing free access to software that typically runs on inexpensive commodity hardware.
"Open source presents a tremendous advantage for countries like SA because it empowers anyone to compete at almost any level with little or no capital investment," says Pratt.
As an example, Pratt cites Calgary-based iStockphoto.com, which was started using two whitebox machines running open source software, but grew into a multimillion-dollar business using an open source infrastructure implemented and supported by IBM.
"Success like this can happen anywhere there is a connection to a network and a bright idea. It could very well happen in Sandton, Soweto, Bloemfontein or Cape Town," he says.
Pratt points out that as the business grew, iStockphoto was able to transition to a more robust mission-critical environment simply by adding hardware and support from a distributor, without changing the basic infrastructure of what it had built.
"IBM`s provision of infrastructure for iStockphoto in no way created a form of lock in, which we have been saying for years is one of the major benefits of open source software. There is complete freedom of choice among the hardware platforms that support Linux," he says.
Related stories:
Futurex 2006 abuzz with business
Open source office opens in Soweto
Share