SITA Adopting Open Source Software for the South African Government

When it announced its plans to ditch expensive commercial software in favour of the open source alternatives. Tonight in the S-files we are taking a look at the reasoning behind this decision, and whether open source is a secure alternative. Open source software has been around for some time now yet most computer users only use proprietary or commercial applications like Microsoft. In the past the limited distribution of open source was attributed to its poor security and usability but technology has evolved to such an extent that this has largely been disproved. Here in South Africa at the State Information Technology Agency, SITA feels the arguments for open source systems are so compelling that it has decided to adopt the technology across most of governments software requirements.

00:49 - On the face value open source software is simply just cheap, easy to use and in fact has makes it sense in IT where the response times have to be so fast it allows everything else that we looking for that we couldn’t get from proprietary software. The basic difference between open source and commercial software lies in the availability of the underlying source codes. Commercial vendors keep the codes to themselves and only sell the rights to use their software whereas open source communities put the source code out into the public domain. And that allows us the freedom, the ease, and in fact the dynaminismto be able to change the software to suite our needs. Some argue that this ability to customise the software can be problematic when upgrading and maintaining the system.

01:44 - As soon as one starts to customise a piece of software you actually change it from the thing you originally had. One needs to recognise that and if you want to be able to ensure a convenient upgrade path from the provider, those changes hinder that process , that upgrade process, so there could be massive hidden costs that one would encounter as a result of upgrading a piece of software. We have a development wing in our own company that is already there, people who have been paid for years, for doing the very work, but they could not change anything that is proprietary because its licensed. The fact that the source codes are freely available and open source have sparked concerns around security. If you look at the hacker attacks in general, commercial systems or proprietary systems are as much, if not more, under attack by these intruders.

02:41 - Where the benefit has swung the open source route is because there are such a wider body of actual providers of services and developers, the actual responsiveness to plugging these holes and to fixing these problems is much more responsive on the one hand and is much more reactive with a much shorter timelines than in the commercial sense. Government also expects to save quite a lot of money by switching to open source. It has currently over the past three years saved more than ten million Rand piloting the software in some of its departments and is expected to save as much as one and half billion Rand over the coming financial year. That in itself is a very huge debate and a very sensitive and a contentious issue as to how those cost savings are actually derived at. Do you only look at the initial savings from a license revenue point of view, or do you also look at the subsequent savings at actually maintaining those solutions.

03:36 - One needs to consider that there are large elements of the South African government and the public sector that are very heavily invested in Microsoft software. Heavily invested in the software in the sense that core to their business processes they have applications that run on the Microsoft platforms and its very difficult for them to just move away without incurring huge costs in having those things rewritten. Well, that brings this evening’s program to an end. Thanks for watching. Next week we’ll bring more IT security issues to the fore so stay tuned for that. From me Jane van Renen and the S-files team, good night. .