Government open source on track

SA government departments ready to increase open source use.

The South African government has been a long-time advocate of open source software and even has an open source strategy in place for migrating government departments over to open source. But progress has been slow, and some have questioned whether government is truly committed to an open source migration.

Arno Webb, head of the State IT Agency's FOSS programme, says that "the move to open source software has not been as fast as we would have liked, but we are now entering a new era. In the past, open source deployments were mostly spontaneous and ad-hoc. We now have a more systematic approach."

Many government departments began the migration to open source many months or even years ago. But in most cases the success of the project relied heavily on having an "open source champion" in the department who would push the process forward. As these champions moved on to other jobs the migrations very often stalled or even began to reverse themselves.

Webb says that one of the crucial steps in paving the way to successful open source migration is to have standards and successful polite projects to set the example. This, he says, is one of the main focus areas of Sita's Foss programme. "It's important that we show successes."

Some successes
One of the departments which has made some progress in migrating to open source software is the SA Revenue Service (SARS). More than two years ago SARS began a process to migrate its desktops to Linux by calling for a proof on concept. Two years on the desktop migration has not happened but the tax-collection arm of government has made some progress towards wider open source use, including wide use of Suse Linux.

On the desktop SARS is considering a thin-client Linux strategy with a proof of concept project planned to evaluate its viability.

In the backoffice, however, SARS is making more progress. The department already runs all of its production SAP systems on Suse Enterprise Linux. The department is also looking to move all of its production DB2 databases AIX to Suse Linux and has already completed a proof of concept project for this.

SARS also runs portions of its call centre setup on Suse Linux running on Sun servers and it uses the open source JBOSS application server for delivering its filing-season applications.

Webb says that while some other departments haven't made as much progress there is growing support for open source among senior IT managers in government. He says that in a survey of the IT officers at the recent government CIO FOSS workshop found that 50 percent of attendees, most of which hold a position of CIO or IT management in their department, were "extremely keen" on open source implementation for their department. Another 40% said that they were "keen" on OSS. In contrast, just 5.6% said that they were not interested in using open source software and no-one completely opposed open source software.

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