Open Source is alive and thriving in SA

Date: 16 May 2005	Issue: 16 May (Computing S.A.)
Category: Comment	Brian Bakker

The brief for this story was to examine the state of open source software (OSS) in SA. Yet, despite the fact that all active open source projects can be found on the Internet, few identify themselves with particular countries or locations. If you are interested, a good place to start looking is SourceForge.net, but be warned, there are well over 100 000 projects listed - many of them dormant.
In reality most OSS projects transcend national boundaries, which is illustrated by the SourceForge project of the month for April. Called Net-SNMP, the project provides tools and libraries relating to the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Its key developers are located in the US (California and Georgia), Denmark and England.
Roy Blume, research manager at local analyst firm BMI-TechKnowledge (BMI-T), says the number of local developers involved in open source is growing. “The beauty of open source is that it is not geographically specific. Very often, if you localise a development too much, you would actually be limiting its potential,” he adds.

Linux versus OSS
He believes it is important to consider Linux and OSS separately. “The adoption of Linux is on the increase in SA. There is more acceptance of Linux from the major players climbing on board with enterprise-level Linux solutions, SuSE, Red Hat, etc,” he adds.
Blume says the likes of Novell and IBM lend credibility to Linux as an offering by licensing fonts, patents and other code to simplify interoperability at an end-user level. “What we are seeing is the acceptance of the corporate, it is taken a lot more seriously with the big guys behind it, and also what we are seeing is that the market is actually waiting for an in-your-face Linux Office implementation,” he adds.
Others putting their weight behind Linux - although not necessarily open source as a concept - include independent software vendors (ISVs) such as IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Symantec/Veritas. All have released versions of the software products that take advantage of Linux as an operating platform.
And Oracle has taken that collaboration one step further by doing what it can to encourage OSS developers to create applications that use the Oracle database - presumably in the hope that it will sell more database licences.
The company recently announced that it was ‘expanding its leadership role in driving developer adoption of the next-generation enterprise Java platform by spearheading a project within the Eclipse open source community to support the Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0 specification.’
Francois Marais, solutions architect for Oracle Application Server at Oracle SA, interprets this as meaning that the Eclipse community [which develops in Java] will have access to the hooks it needs to access and/or store data in an Oracle relational database. “We want to make sure that Eclipse developers can utilise Oracle databases and the Oracle Application Server to deploy their applications,” he says.

Free as in freedom
As is clearly illustrated by the Oracle example, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Developers and companies producing code have every right to make money from their efforts.
One of the misconceptions about the open source movement is that the software that it produces is always free. Whether or not it is free depends very much on the particular licence chosen by the developer (see the GPL discussion elsewhere in this publication).
Certainly there are people in this world, like Richard Stallman, who believe that all software should be free. But, despite the fact that he wrote the GPL, Stallman does not represent the entire open source community.
If that were the case, the likes of IBM, Novell and Oracle would not have become involved, because, after all, these are large multinational companies responsible to their shareholders first, and customers second.
But, having said all that, a lot of open source software IS free. In fact, visitors to this year’s LinuxWorld SA exhibition will no doubt collect a considerable volume of apparently free software. It would be advisable to consult licence agreements bundled on the CDs to clarify terms of use.
As an aside, the typical open source licence agreement is written in plain English, and usually consists of around 3 000 words in total. It is not couched in complex legalese that requires teams of legal experts to decipher.

Local OSS
Although the OSS movement is a global one, as pointed out earlier by Blume, there is a growing number of local developments, and many that have quite extensive local ties.
Says Professor Derek Keats, executive director: information and communication services at the University of the Western Cape (UWC): “We are committing R10m over three years to the development of a student enrolment management system (SEMS).”
Despite committing such a large chunk of cash to the project, the university is determined that the final product should be free software. “It is our intention to produce a system that is usable by other African higher education institutions, some of which will eventually join with us in creating the generic components of the system,” notes Rector Brian O’Connell.
Another wholly local and free OSS project is Impi Linux. Version 1 was based on Debian and Knoppix, while version 2 (released 6 October 2004) is not based on any distribution. It aims to be the first business desktop Linux distribution that is tailored specifically to the needs of African users.
If the comments of State IT Agency (Sita) CTO, Sidwell Ngqandu, are anything to go by, it has met its goals admirably.
The organisation recently completed the first phase of a project to evaluate the readiness of two Linux distributions to, in Ngqandu’s words, ‘prepare Sita to migrate to open source’.

“Our conclusions are that open source does work and Linux does work,” he says.

Show me the money
However, altruism does not pay the bills. And, since Impi Linux is free, it is worth examining how it comes to be so. Ross Addis, CIO of Impi Linux, says the project is funded by a commercial software venture called Cubit. “Cubit is a browser-based accounting system with over 5 000 current users, ranging from small one-man operations to medium-sized listed entities,” he expands.
He notes that there are many other local OSS projects under way, and cites an example: a PHP content management system called Drupal (drupal.org). “There are (local) people who contribute to open source in general, and a few who also contribute towards Linux kernel development,” he adds.
While Addis could not provide a definitive number of local developers involved in the OSS movement, he notes that it is probably hundreds rather than thousands. He says that the reasons why SA lags the rest of the world are mostly financial. “Students at university in Europe are subsidised by government. Their bandwidth costs are also next to nothing, they get decent bandwidth for what we pay for a telephone in this country,” he says.
Neither is the chairman of the local OSS Workgroup, Nhlanhla Mabaso, sure how many locals are involved in OSS, but he believes that he will have a handle on the number in twelve months or so. “One of the things that we are going to be doing formally, as a European Union-funded research activity, is answering that very question. We will investigate the extent of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) usage, adoption and contribution to FLOSS projects within SA,” he says.
Still, he believes the number has grown dramatically in the last two years. “I have been told that the Linux User Group (LUG) at the University of Pretoria, which when I last attended about two years ago had about 30 members, now comprises over 600 people,” he comments.

Co-existence
Mabaso is pleased about the trend toward co-existence between proprietary and open source software. “It looks more sensible when you have multinationals like SAP, Novell, Oracle, HP, Sun, linking their proprietary offerings to open source opportunities,” he says.
Another multinational getting heavily involved in the OSS movement is IBM. On the international front the company invested $100m in Novell when the latter purchased SuSE Linux. Locally, the company has set up two Linux Centres of Competence, one in Johannesburg and one in Cape Town, where companies can go for assistance in scoping and setting up Linux pilot projects.
Says Joe Ruthven, technical sales manager of IBM SA’s software business: “We have only been live in Johannesburg for about four weeks, and we have done three projects. I launched the Linux Centre of Competence this morning (mid-April) in Cape Town and we had 130 people at the event - we were expecting 100.”
Blume believes there is great business potential in OSS. He believes a successful model can be built by encouraging traditional open source developers to continue doing what he calls the R&D work, while the commercial entities then stress-test and polish the product. “The service guys will take this beautiful R&D rough work that the (OSS developers) have put together, using their combined genius and smooth it out, making it more user-friendly,” he explains.
The message appears to be that there is place in the world for both proprietary and open source software. Some people just have not realised it yet.

Beginner’s Corner

The uninitiated often perceive the terms open source software (OSS) and Linux as synonymous. In fact, the latter is a derivative of the former in the sense that Linux is merely an example of an open source project - and probably the best-known one at that.
Now that we have cleared that up, let us create some more confusion: LinuxWorld is not just about Linux, it is about OSS. In order to give a more accurate reflection of what you will see there, the exhibition and conference should have been called OSSworld - but that does not quite have the same ring as LinuxWorld. And, not surprisingly, that same logic applies to this magazine.
Given that Linux is a focal point, if not the exclusive focus, perhaps we should start there: Linux is an operating system (OS) and is therefore comparable to Windows. It does the same job in that it provides the platform on top of which applications like e-mail, browsers, games and office suites, among others, can run.
The key differences between Windows and Linux are as follows:
* Price. The only fair pricing comparison is at a retail level and
the difference is about R2 000; that is R2 000 more for
Windows than for Linux.
* Additional software. Regardless of which Linux
distribution (distro) you choose, it will have a huge amount
of software bundled with it. This will include an office
productivity suite (probably openOffice.org), an e-mail
application, a Web browser, many other applications and, of
course, games.
* Support. For someone accustomed to Windows, Linux can
pose challenges and there is most certainly a learning curve
to go through. External support skills are available but may
be more difficult to find, especially if you cannot Google.
* Security. You have probably heard about viruses. And while
there are Linux viruses about, they tend to be far less
numerous and inestimably less virulent than their Windows
cousins.
* Open source. When the source code to all the programs
on your computer is freely available to the whole world,
security becomes your responsibility. Do not give your root
(administrator) password to anyone whom you do not trust.

Horses for courses

Today’s desktop world is dominated by Microsoft - a situation that is unlikely to change in the near future. However, the ubiquity of the Windows platform brings with it a number of problems, specifically spam, worms and viruses.
Typically what happens is a Windows PC or server is compromised by a virus or Internet worm and then, unbeknownst to its user(s), it becomes a relay station for spam. Now numerous companies have created anti-virus and anti-spam systems, many of these run on a Microsoft platform, and are therefore themselves vulnerable to viruses and worms.
Enter Linux. While no-one claims that Linux is immune from viruses the reality is that Linux PCs and servers are typically more difficult to compromise, partly because of the diversity inherent in so many different distributions, over 300 at last count.
Consequently, it provides an almost perfect platform on which to offer anti-virus and anti-spam solutions - and several local companies are doing just that. One such company is Technology Systems Integration, whose MD, Michael Brunzlik, says: “We use whatever of these ‘free’ OSS efforts together with appropriate commercial endeavours combined together on backbone servers and offer this as a managed service to the commercial world.
“We are achieving extremely good spam and virus filtering rates by using the ‘Defence in depth’ approach, centralised. Our experience of the efficiency of the OSS anti-virus engines is also very encouraging. To push the spam reduction efficiency and help with the extremely low false positives, we have implemented an OSS Web-based facility to allow those users to manage personalised ‘White’ and ‘Black’ lists,” he explains.
Who says that you cannot make a living from ‘free’ software...?