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16 September 2006

All protocol observed, welcome.

The doors of learning and culture shall be opened!
* The government shall discover, develop and encourage national talent for the enhancement of our cultural life
* All the cultural treasures of mankind shall be open to all, by free exchange of books, ideas and contact with other lands.

The Freedom Charter

I would suggest that at the congress of the people in Kliptown, on 26 June 1955, if they had known about the impact that Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) would have on our lives they would have included software or software code in the above statement.

In South Africa, as in many developing countries, there is a lack of ICT infrastructure and connectivity, low levels of ICT literacy and, a lack of awareness of these resources. We need to achieve true transformation that will see all sectors of society not only being passive recipients of technologies developed elsewhere, but participating in all aspects of innovation. The Free and Open Software (FOSS) phenomenon, by its very nature, encourages this approach. It calls for the freedom to:
* run the software for any purpose
* study how the software works, and adapt it to your needs
* redistribute the copies and share the knowledge with your neighbour
* improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Software Freedom Day is a global effort to educate the public about the virtues and availability of FOSS. In keeping with the drive by government in creating awareness and promoting the benefits of FOSS the DST is celebrating this day.

There has always been good support for Software Freedom Day from the South African government; in 2004 the Minister of Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) gave the keynote address at an event hosted by the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) and in 2005 the Minister of Science and Technology was at Wits University to address celebrants. Today that honour rests with me. Unfortunately we do no expect to get the same crowds that attended previous events as we are quite new to hosting this event and when our communications people advertised software freedom day they forgot to add that the entrance was also free. Some people might think that we are hosting this event to raise funds to pay for this new building.

While the others who have the full picture might think that if the event is free it can't be very good. Just like FOSS we hope to prove them wrong. Civil Society Organisations have a petition to government to adopt FOSS on the table outside because they believe that we have the ability to influence the ICT market as a result of our large ICT spend, and that we therefore have the ability to make FOSS more readily available. I can assure them that it is the policy of the DST to migrate to open source software. DST will implement FOSS unless proprietary software is demonstrated to be significantly superior. Whenever the advantages of FOSS and proprietary software are comparable, FOSS will be implemented when choosing a software solution for a new project. Whenever FOSS is not implemented, then reasons must be provided in order to justify the implementation of proprietary software. The vision is that all new software developed for or by the DST will be based on open standards, adherent to FOSS principles, and licensed using a FOSS license where possible.

Edward Rakate was the first person in the DST to be migrated to FOSS and by the end of this month the entire National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) unit will be running FOSS. The NACI desktop now consists of Kubuntu Linux as the operating systems, Open Office as the productivity suite and Firefox as the web browser. The plan is that this desktop will be rolled out to the entire DST.

This is in addition to the FOSS we are already running on our web servers, firewalls, private automatic branch exchange (PABX), proxies, mail relays and network tools amongst others. We promote FOSS not only because we want to use high quality software and the latest technology but because FOSS is an excellent platform for scientific computing, it gives scientists access to the tools they require to perform their work no matter what area they decide to specialise in. Therefore you will find FOSS in our bio-chemistry projects, our astronomy projects, and our Human Language Technologies (HLT) and access programmes.

We hope you enjoy the programme that we have put together and take the message of FOSS back to your communities so that we grow the community of Free Software users and innovators which we hope will lead to locally-relevant and globally competitive technology solutions.

Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
16 September 2006
Source: Department of Science and Technology (http://www.dst.gov.za)