South African government adopt OSS

Something that has been grabbing media attention recently is the news of our Government's policy to promote the use of open-source software. The story goes back to September last year when ITWeb reported that the Government had released a draft-version OSS policy framework document by a high-level advisory body. The framework recommended that government "explicitly" support the adoption of open source software as part of its e-government strategy.

Near the end of last month, Business Day posted an article confirming that the Government had decided to adopt OSS and develop support programs with local research institutes and universities.

For months the State IT Agency had winced at the incessant expense of buying software licences for hundreds of thousands of staff spread across government departments. Now the agency has declared that it will ditch expensive brand name software in many cases and switch to opensource alternatives.

This story was slashdotted, the result of which started numerous debates from the site's readers about the decision, South Africa as a country, a continent, other countries, patriots, ex-patriots, Apartheid, Microsoft, and panties.com.

It's interesting to read how we are perceived as a country (in some cases a continent) and the naivity of most of the site's users. The Government's OSS site rightfully reports that most of the comments are ignorant, for example:

How will this affect apartheid?

to which was replied

Hey - wake up dude! Apartheid died in '94...

What bothers SA is that they buy licenses of software, but yet not one company develops software in SA.

to which was replied

Not one company develops software in SA? I wonder what I have been doing for the past years. FYI South Africa has a vibrant software industry with some very innovative developers.

SA is a 2nd world country at best. It's very violent and corrupt. Bullets are flying all the time. SA's short golden days have ended.

to which was replied

I live and work in South Africa, and I'm white. Nobody's demanding extortion money from me. Nobody's shooting at me. In fact, things are better than ever. We still have a deeply corrupt government, but at least we elected them for a change. And for all their embezzlement and lunatic AIDS policies, their decision to go the OSS route gives me renewed hope for the future. Come visit us. You'd dig it.

What is the population of Africa? You'd think with a population the size of that, they will never run out of programmers.

to which was replied

You can't count every one of a billion Africans as a potential programmer. Not everyone has electricity, for one thing. Of those who do, not everyone can afford a computer -- and there aren't a lot of libraries with public Internet access.

Other comments simply made me smile:

Kudos to South Africa. It's turned into one of the most unenlightened regime to the most forward looking government in 10 years or so. I hope Cape Town becomes a high tech Mecca and Redmond becomes a bantustan for crappy software developers.

We have an economy poised for a major upturn where as most of the rest of the world is teetering on a depression. If you are no longer living in South Africa then good riddance, if you are then get off your whinny butt and do something for your country or emigrate if you think the rest of the world is going to be so much better!

CNET's Paul Festa, who has received criticism in the past from the Mozilla community, joined the party yesterday announcing Monday's release of the final version policy document.

The detailed strategy document was made public by the Government's OSS Work Group, having been accepted by the GITOC. The working group, composed primarily of government agency representatives, holds the primary responsibility for formulating the government's open source policy. The government is the largest single buyer of computer technology in South Africa.