A Roadmap to Proliferate Open Source Software Usage within SA Government Servers

Open source software (OSS) is increasingly being recognized by the government sector around the world as a viable choice to proprietary software, particularly in a number of areas of information technology (IT) such as on the network servers. In the OSS domain, it is perceived that OSS has the potential to deliver better value for money, high quality software, secure, flexible, stable and reliable network applications. The South African (SA) government acknowledges that OSS is a viable alternative to proprietary software especially on the servers. According to the data collected (survey) from various SA government departments and agencies, indications are that OSS is not fully implemented on the network servers, although the global trends indicate high usage of OSS within the network environment. The main aim of this paper is to propose a roadmap that can be used to aid SA ministries to increase OSS usage.