[okfn-za] Open Source in Government

[Thomas Bevan]

Hi Adi

Interesting project. If you haven't seen this already, check out the SITA 
FOSS roadmap: http://www.sita.co.za/FOSS/FOSS1.html

Limpopo Province, interestingly enough, has been moving towards using FOSS.

There is a lot of interest in government wrt open source, but the major 
proprietary vendors are well established and offer "out of the box 
solutions", whether true or not. 

Just something to note - local companies seem to have limited capacity wrt 
FOSS, especially for major, multi-year government projects. Also, 
government is restricted to using vendors registered with SITA, and these 
tend to be MS shops, or use other proprietary platforms.

If you do gather some numbers for comparison, take into consideration the 
costs of customising open source for specific purposes. Scarce skills and 
resources = $$$.

Thomas

On Monday, August 5, 2013 3:16:25 PM UTC+2, Adi Eyal wrote:
>
> Hi All 
>
> I'm working on a personal project which these groups may find 
> interesting. I'd like to build a case for why moving government 
> departments to using open source software makes economic sense. I'm 
> doing this by laboriously contacting each government department and 
> asking them what software they use and how much they pay for it. 
>
> Yes I know - I may be a little idealistic and a touch naive, but I'm 
> not trying to argue the philosophical merits of why open source 
> software may be better than proprietary software. 
>
> My logic is simply: 
>
> If government spends Rx billion annually importing proprietary 
> software and they rather redirect that money to the local software 
> community for installation, customisation, support and hosting then we 
> can create Y new jobs. 
>
> It's a lot of work but hopefully I can convince a few more people to 
> help me. I have data from 5 departments so far with a total annual 
> spend of over R26m. 
>
> I would really appreciate your help. Collecting this information is 
> time consuming. I plan to collect information across all spheres of 
> government which you can imagine is a mammoth task. Any contribution - 
> no matter how small would definitely ease the burden. 
>
> If you want more information - have a look at this link: 
> https://github.com/adieyal/gov-software-audit 
>
>
> Just one caveat - this project is not about complaining about 
> Microsoft or snide comments about whether government is useless, 
> inefficient or incompetent. I am an idealist and I prefer a naively 
> optimistic approach. Even if the project fails (and the odds are 
> against it), I think it is a worthwhile cause and will add another 
> voice to why this is a good thing. 
>
> Comments welcome. 
>
> Adi 
>
> -- 
> Adi Eyal 
> Data Specialist 
> phone: +27 78 014 2469 
> skype: adieyalcas 
> linkedin: http://za.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Adi/Eyal 
>
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