Microsoft, Red Hat, and South Africa’s OS strategy

Not even a week after Jason Matusow, Microsoft Director of Corporate Standards, wrote on his blog that South Africans don't understand Open Source Software or how to benefit from it, Linux vendor Red Hat have announced that they're to open an office in South Africa. Via Tectonic:

Starting Monday Red Hat will have an SA-based country manager who will be responsible for the Southern Africa market on behalf of the company.

Red Hat previously had no offices in Africa, preferring to work through local partners. Paul Holt, Red Hat regional director, says South Africa and Southern Africa is a market with growing opportunities for Red Hat.

And again via Tectonic, South Africans don’t understand OSS - Microsoft:

“Deep dev of the core OS” was not likely to happen in South Africa where students were “still grappling with coding skills”, says Matusow. They are “not going to dive into the inner workings of Linux”, says Matusow.

“Any innovation on Linux that is broadly applicable will immediately be picked up by Red Hat or Novell and commercialized globally with little economic benefit coming back to SA.”

One response to Matusow points out that a number of key open source projects have South African roots. Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, was founded by South African Mark Shuttleworth while OpenBSD and OpenSSH are the brainchild of ex-South African Theo de Raadt.

What a gem. Dugg here.