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ALTHOUGH GOVERNMENT HAS adopted the principle of open source software as a policy objective, only a few of its departments are implementing it enthusiastically. Those include the Department of Science & Technology, parts of the Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS) and the State IT Agency (Sita).
Sun Microsystems South Africa MD Inana Nkanza says there is deployment but not as high profile or fast moving as open source proponents such as it would like to see. He says there are lobbies that still believe this isn’t the way to go, making its implementation difficult in some areas.
However, Sun Microsystems says adopting open source will ultimately make Government departments more productive.
Crawford Beveridge, executive vice-president and chairman for Sun Microsystems Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) says although the group makes most of its money from infrastructure, it’s also the biggest contributor to open source lines code. It does derive some revenue from service contracts related to the software platforms it’s built on top of the freely available open source code. He says such contracts are necessary, particularly if you want to deploy those platforms in a mission critical environment.
Beveridge says Sun president Jonathan Schwartz also has a passion for getting as many people as possible worldwide connected to the Internet and if that happens more will need the infrastructure to do so. “We’ll get our percentage of that.”
Nkanza says proprietary software “holds you hostage” due to the “lock-in” format of the information. That’s a problem for Government, which has traditionally been locked in to the technology it uses. However, if you want to roll out e-Government as a delivery mechanism to citizens, you must keep the total cost of ownership as low as possible in order not to burden citizens with the cost of being able to access services such as education and an effective e-health system.
But Nkanza says the problem of converting from proprietary solutions to open source isn’t an insurmountable one. “It doesn’t happen overnight.” Microsoft, he concedes, has been a pioneer in donating software. However, that creates an entire generation that only knows one software platform.
Beveridge says you just have to start simply and there’s no need to throw everything (such as hardware, or even some of the software) away and start from scratch. There’s also nothing wrong with mixing parts of open source and proprietary software. “Interoperability is important.”
Beveridge was in SA to attend the Presidential International Advisory Council on the Information Society and says from his discussions with Government it does seem it remains “very committed” to implementing open source. The gap between a policy stance and actually implementing it could just take time. “As long as Government sticks to it, it will eventually happen.”
He says a number of issues are starting to resonate with governments worldwide. Those include costs, the inclusion of citizens and ensuring information they store digitally will be accessible for a long time. Governments that have successfully adopted open source platforms include Brazil, Belgium, states in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, as well as large ministries in the governments of France, Germany, Finland, Spain and other parts of the European Union. “There’s a huge shift going on,” says Beveridge.
He says open source also changes the foreign direct investment proposition. Countries tended to want to see investors offering to build a factory and manufacture things there. But Beveridge says that’s such a “last century” way of doing things because in tough economic times the same jobs that had been created simply go out the window to cheaper centres elsewhere worldwide. A country needs “intellectual property, not just heads”.
Beveridge says adopting open standards gives companies and governments an amazing number of choices between developers, including Sun, IBM, Google and Novell. And if one doesn’t perform there’s very little cost to change to another provider.
Sun is also a proponent of “green IT” and claims a number of innovations in terms of reducing the energy consumption in a data centre (the so-called back end) and on desktops (the so-called front end) through its “thin client” platform. Given that SA’s Government is the biggest user of IT, its power usage in that regard is also important, Beveridge says.
He adds that given that Sun’s strategy is generally to reduce the total cost of ownership incurred on IT, it’s also watching developments on the regulatory front in SA – such as Altech Autopage’s recent High Court judgment – very closely, given the positive cost implications for the affordability of broadband in SA.
Finweek
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