After months of deliberation South Africa's State IT Agency (Sita) has decided on the group which will provide open source software and support services over the next three years, in response to its open source tender. The group which consists of 8 companies from across the world including IBM and Novell will provide Sita with the ability to:
"exercise an option to procure from any one of these [companies]" says Wynand Swart, Project manager for open source at Sita.
Three Linux distributions were chosen: Suse, RedHat and Impi/Ubuntu. All of which I agree with as being appropriate for the needs of a state based IT agency. The selection process spanned over five months and evidently required quite a bit of time and energy to carry out the technical evaluations. This development is far more relevant than just its status as today's news indicates and I have a theory about what it means:
I think it is critical to watch the development of open source business practices within the governments of the developing world. Despite the fact that they do not have the infrastructure of more developed first world countries, they do have significant cost limitations/pressures that cause them to be more open minded about evaluating open source solutions.
Because of lower budgets and higher pressures to reduce costs these government organizations must exhibit a higher tolerance for risk. And it remains my prediction that in 2006 an increasing amount of tenders such as the one issued by Sita will continue to be put forth by the government of developing countries all throughout the world.
Such actions will provide an immediate opportunity for the world to observe the effectiveness of open source as a solution at different levels of government. And while the societal context for every scenario will differ drastically, the overall process all the way from technical analysis, to procurement to deployment/support/maintenance can be studied to uncover patterns and trends helpful to risk mitigation and best practice development.
It is likely that as more and more governments throughout the world become involved with actively using open source, some current barriers of entry will be demolished. When governments are capable of observing the effect of introducing the flexibility and cost savings associated with open source, more and more will potentially follow suite.
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