The South African government has long been developing and implementing an FOSS based plan as a backbone to its developmental plans. It conducted a study between 2001 and 2003 on the viability of FOSS as an alternative to proprietary software.
The study took into considerations the total cost of ownership, FOSS benefits, and alternative applications to determine its viability.
The government, since then, implemented a three-phase plan on how departments can start to implement FOSS. This was gradually done by different departments starting 2002 when the OSS strategy was developed and the document of this strategy was published.
The document itself does not outline a detailed plan of exactly how to conduct this implementation. It reads more as a guideline of the implementation process with certain objectives and concepts to be aware of in the creation of a detailed implementation plan by each ministry. This plan entitled “Open Software and Open Standards in South Africa: A Critical Issue for Addressing the Digital Divide introduced to Cabinet by The National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI)”.
This 2002 plan was conducted to:
- Promote interoperability.
- Promote universal citizens access to online government services without prohibitive costs, license restrictions or similar barriers.
- Minimise the risk of lock-in to specific vendors of ICT products and services.
- Lower the entry barriers for local developers who can offer ICT solutions for use in the public sector.
In 2005, a conference was held engaging all members of the society concerned with FOSS in SA, i.e. government, civil society, and the private sector, where a decision was reached that the 2002 policy needed to be redrafted.
The revised policy includes five main pillars:
- 1. The South African Government will implement FOSS unless proprietary software is demonstrated to be significantly superior. Whenever the advantages of FOSS and proprietary software are comparable, FOSS will be implemented when choosing a software solution for a new project. Whenever FOSS is not implemented, then reasons must be provided in order to justify the implementation of proprietary software.
- 2. The South African Government will migrate current proprietary software to FOSS whenever comparable software exists
- 3. All new software developed for or by the South African Government will be based on open standards, adherent to FOSS principles, and licensed using a FOSS license where possible.
- 4. The South African Government will ensure all government content and developed content using governmental resources is made Open Content, unless analysis on specific content shows that proprietary licensing or confidentiality is substantially beneficial.
- 5. The South African Government will encourage the use of Open Content and Open Standards within South Africa, The South African government then outlines 10 different initiation projects and entrusts them to different ministries.
The challenges South Africa’s government faced when implement FOSS:
- Can’t develop open source software to be compatible with the currently proprietary solutions that had already used in this time. This is attested to the fact that most departments use custom made proprietary applications which deal with things like taxation, statistics and data calculation, causing a large challenge in finding an OSS product compatible to this specific closed source base.
- Hampering OSS implementation are the lack of support
- Lack of approved standards when choosing a software.
- User resistance to use this new kind of software.
In a way, too much is left unanswered which has allowed less accountability in accomplishing the objectives stated. The authors of the SA study suggest that there needs to be three stages to plan development:
- Planning and trial (pilot cases)
- Realization (overall successful solution deployment in the overall government)
- Development (further tweaking of plan).