[OSGeo Africa] South African government free and open source software policy

[Kate Lance]

Can someone give me an indication of how the South African government free and open source software policy affects (or will affect) geospatial software procurement (and government supported software-development)?    
If the policy does (or eventually will) extend to geospatial software, then how will those making procurement decisions judge whether proprietary software is "significantly superior" or not (has SITA prepared criteria/guidelines for such evaluation)?
 
http://www.apc.org/english/rights/africa/?apc=he_1&x=5193463
South African government free and open source software policy
October 6, 2007: The Chief Technology Officer of the South African State Information Technology Agency (SITA), announced the launch of the government-wide free and open source programme at the GovTech conference held early September. While many welcomed the February announcement of government's intention to adopt and promote open source software, the subsequent months saw disillusionment within the open source community that very little had actually happened. Sita's Daniel Mashao addressed these worries, describing what had been happening behind the scenes and showing a systematic timetable of how this process will indeed be implemented. He outlined the government's policy. The five key points are: 1) Choose FOSS, 2) Migrate to FOSS, 3) Develop in FOSS, 4) Use FOSS/open content licensing, and 5) Promote FOSS in South Africa. Under the policy, when introducing new software, the SA government will implement open source solutions unless a proprietary option
 is demonstrated to be "significantly superior". In any instances where proprietary software is implemented, reasons must be given to justify its use. Migration of current systems is also planned. This will be done in a phased approach, beginning with applications such as replacing MS Office with Open Office or KOffice and replacing Internet Explorer with Firefox. This will in time lead up to the operating system, replacing Windows with a Linux distribution. Migration to Apache for the running of government websites has already occurred within a number of departments. All new software developed for or by the government is to be based on open standards and licensed under an open source licence where possible. 
 
See: Policy on Free and Open Source Software use for South African Government - approved by Cabinet on 22 February 2007, http://www.oss.gov.za/FOSS_OC_POLICY_2006.pdf


       
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