Last year, the South African government announced their intention to roll out open source implementations across all government departments. A move that surprised, but delighted me and many others.
So, when statements are made like the one made recently by Microsoft's director of corporate standards that South Africans were unlikely to benefit from OSS, or do any 'deep' development work on Linux (hello, heard of Ubuntu?), I have to ask myself, where is this coming from? What is a statement like that aimed at achieving? Furthermore, saying that students in South Africa are 'still grappling with coding skills' smacks of complete ignorance.
While I don't agree with all the government's policies, they should be applauded for the move to OSS and for setting a precedent that other developing countries in Africa may follow. Well done!
2 comments:
Tell them to use Mono, mpatric!
Of course they want open source. Try find a univerisity grad willing to work in public sector SA that really "gets" OO. Or athything else for that matter. Like maybe, Identity Federation. Or application firewalls like IAG or Juniper. Try asking someone the diffrence between bounded and un-bounded iteration loops. When you have to push x people through university to meed affirmative action quotas open source is an obvious short term solution that hides long term deficiencies. Which is why first there was white power, then there was black power, and now there is no power.
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