You have to hand it to Microsoft. Its loyal legionnaires advance bravely into the fire-breathing maw of the government dragon, neither quivering nor showing fear. But you can smell it.
"Please, Mr Government Man, you're big and scary. We don't want to fight you, but please don't keep us out! It's cold out here, and dark! We'll play nice. It's about open standards, is it not? We do open standards. More, we embrace them, extend them, and envelop them, warmly!"
"No, the collective has spoken, and what the collective said was, 'free and open source'," retorts Mr Government Man. "And the collective meant 'open source', not 'open standards'."
"Eep. Uhm, if we open our gates, will you open yours? Look, half the software on sourceforge is written for both Linux and Windows."
"That's because it's open, doofus. It has taken five years, and it may take another five years, but we'll be rid of imperialist software soon enough. Then we won't have to pay foreign taxes anymore."
"Eep. We're open too, and we have 55 000 pages of documentation to prove it!"
"We'll read them when we get a minute. Ha ha, what am I saying? No, we'll be too busy reading man pages to get Asterisk to work, sorry."
The torchbearer for Microsoft was Paulo Ferreira. Despite being thrust into the vanguard as cannon fodder by the Roman legions of proprietary software, he bravely advanced on hostile opposition, and acquitted himself well. Still, to quote a colleague of mine: "He fell into the Kool-Aid as a baby."
His most outspoken - and well-spoken - opposite number was Daniel Mashao, the CTO of SITA, and the host of the conference. If Ferreira is a Kool-Aid legionnaire, Mashao fell into the magic potion as a baby. Implementing ubuntu requires Ubuntu, and what better way to adopt the Open Document Format than installing OpenOffice? Besides, you can run Microsoft software on Linux, though why you'd want to is a mystery. Show them, Eghshaan (Khan, SITA's CIO). Click. Magic. See?
Despite being thrust into the vanguard as cannon fodder by the Roman legions of proprietary software, he [Microsoft's Paulo Ferreira] bravely advanced on hostile opposition, and acquitted himself well.
Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist and columnist.
Unfortunately, SITA's CEO, Llewellyn Jones, couldn't make it, having just thrown the battlefield into confusion by resigning his post, because he was "gatvol" - to use his own term, of interference by the government CIO, Michelle Williams.
Mashao, however, was ably seconded by another CIO, Aslam Raffee of the DST, who leads the GITOC OSS workgroup, and who sips of the magic potion himself when the occasion demands it.
If all those acronyms sent you into a spin of confusion, you've spotted the same weakness the Kool-Aid battalion has seen. All the magic potion in the world can't make sense of the confusion in the ubuntu collective, where everyone is a general.
Besides GITOC (the Government IT Officers' Council), and SITA (the State IT Agency), the Meraka Institute at the CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research), the PNC on ISAD (Presidential National Commission on Information Society and Development), not to mention the NACI (National Advisory Council on Innovation) and the CPSI (Centre for Public Service Innovation) each have their assigned roles and positions in the government's open source strategy. Mostly, these divisions serve to cover the rear of the Departments of Trade and Industry, Public Services and Administration, Science and Technology, and, of course, Communications, and spend their time debating the war strategy drafted by the Office of the Government CIO, at one big SITA GovTech shindig after another.
Meanwhile, back at the village, the idiot bard (the Department of Education) completely missed the fine distinction SITA drew between "open standards" and "open source software", and accepted a contract for "free software" for 26 000 schools. From Microsoft.
Which goes to show that pleading and weaselling, sowing confusion and plotting subversive infiltration, does work. Feed 'em free Kool-Aid when they're young, and they'll never even touch the magic potion.
When this great spectacle of feud and warfare had played itself out, there was no discernable victor. When evening fell over the brave warriors in the small but strategic outpost of Durban, even the bard had been forgiven, and they celebrated deep into the night with herbs, wine and tasty boar. But out heroes will return, in the next exciting instalment: Asterisk on Vista.
* Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist and columnist, who blogs at http://ivo.co.za/. He has used Ubuntu for years - the price is right - but he is casting about for a capitalist alternative now that the collective has spoken so forcefully in its favour.
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