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In the current world, software is increasingly becoming important in the human activity. It is widely recognised that Open Source software (OSS) is freely available to anyone who needs it. However, loyalty of computer users to proprietary operating systems and general office applications seems to be still high especially in developing countries. OSS has a great potential of saving costs for developing economies in Africa and reducing the cost of doing business and automating operations. The software would be very useful especially in the current period of economic hardships being faced by many developing countries. African governments have also not taken the lead in adopting the OSS software and many do not have policies in place regarding it. A review of literature on studies conducted in Africa on OSS in order to establish the level of user adoption, possible barriers to OSS adoption in developing countries in Africa is done in this paper. The findings are of great value to all stakeholders, namely the software developers, policy makers and computer experts in their endeavour to achieve high user adoption of OSS.

Interpersonal communication among a group of users employing different media types is becoming more and more widespread in computing and telecommunications. Group communication places a variety of new requirements onto the underlying communications architecture and although many existing protocols and services do offer some limited support for multicast group communication, these new requirements make it difficult to find efficient and comprehensive solutions. The impact of multimedia group communication on the communication system and the way in which existing systems, international standardization bodies and researchers cope with these challenges is the subject of this paper. First the characteristics and requirements of multimedia group applications are discussed and illustrated by examples of existing group applications. Subsequently a survey of the kind of support available in today's communication system is presented. In addition the ongoing discussion about the standardization of group communication within ISO and ITU and the direction these efforts take is briefly summarized. Further, some selected examples of research projects which deal with different communication and protocol related aspects of multimedia group communication are presented which give an indication of the trends in this area.

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