Sita issues open-source software tender

What a poor choice of wording for his job title :D

"But analyst" Adrian Schofield of Forge Ahead warns of a critical lack of technology skills within government, and fears that even the private sector may not have sufficient skills to support a nationwide shift to open source.

Savings on licences must be balanced with the cost of technical support, he says. “I don’t think anybody can try to measure how much this is going to save. That would be based on a lot of theory and a minimum of practice.”
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Something to remember is that the savings on licences represents a saving to the economy as a whole - even if the same money is spent on technical support, its money that goes to local suppliers, and stays within the country. (At least a much higher percentage than with license fees that go directly to multinationals.)
 
I'm sure SITA looked at those issues in their decision to go opensource, so it's not a revelation. Skills can be grown...
 
There must be few jobs worse than being a "but analyst", but I guess it's appropriate when it comes to analysing government stuff.
 
Its been in the pipe works for a long time, that gov. was looking at replacing windows with linux.
 
Good, finally they take a bigger stride in the right direction
personally i think we have a lot of talented ppl in SA... proof is IMPI Linux, we managed to put together the glueing pieces to have our own distro.

It will probably take a while to get most of the packages replaced but once this is done local developers will get more business and i m quite happy that most of the taxpayers money won't be leaving the country cause of licence fees and support contracts... Go OpenSource ! :D
 
Sita decided in 2002 to adopt open source gradually, after a bill of R485m from Microsoft for 100000 three-year licences.
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That is a lot of money and could go a long way in being invested in local companies as opposed to most of it being sent overseas to Mr Bill Gates.

We have proven a number of times that we have people more than capable to design and maintain systems and I reckon there should be some kudos to SITA for opting to go this route.

Let's just hope that they do not rest on their laurels and take 3 years to get this off the ground.
 
ic said:
...going open source will be good for government...
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Nothing new about open-source in government. There's been loads of it running there for over 10 years, mostly *BSD.

Still, getting more in can hardly hurt.

:D
 
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