OStatic

Another Win for Open Source in Government

In many parts of the world, the government sector has been a fairly strong supporter of open source software. We can speculate on why this is so - I'd like to think it's good leadership, but limited funds are no doubt another important driver. In any case, today's virtual papers brought the news of anotehr big governmental endorsement for open source software.

ITWeb reports on a wholesale shift to FOSS at SITA, the State Information Technology Agency in South Africa. Over the next four to five months, SITA intends to move its entire technology infrastructure off of proprietary platforms and on to open source ones, headlined by Ubuntu Linux.

The change encompasses 2,300 employees and 1,300 contractors, but that's just the most obvious part of the impact here. SITA (a private company wholly-owned by the South African government) is charged with providing information processing and advice across all levels of government in South Africa. By switching to open source, they can make a much stronger argument to other parts of the government about the viability of open source alternatives.

Couple this with the continued pressure for open standards in the EU (see our coverage from earlier today), and it's a good day for open source advocates in the public sector. 

• government
• EU
• south africa

by an anonymous user on Jun. 12, 2008

This is very exciting news and quite an undertaking in terms of moving 3,600+ employees to a new Ubuntu-based platform. I would be very curious to see how the transition unfolds and hope the Ubuntu group, an academic group, or the like fund a study to document the process. This information could both provide the OSS community information about where to improve its software and/or interfaces and serve as very potent info when making a case for the next organization (government or private) considering to take the plunge into OSS.

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