An investigation into the implementation of open source software within the SA government

Use of Free and Open Source Software for Competitive Advantage in South African Higher Institutions of Learning

“…Exorbitant money is been paid in hard currency to purchase software and renewing of the licenses. Evans and Reedy [14] as well as Mtsweni and Bierman [15] mention cost saving as one of the rationale for FOSS adoption. Dudley-Sponaugle [16] and Kamau and Namuye [17] indicated that FOSS poses benefits such as cost saving.…”

“…Richter et al [19] discovered that for many businesses, FOSS adoption is centred on value creation and that benefits not only originate only from cost but also from reliability, flexibility and higher degree of innovation and knowledge. In as much as the source code is accessible knowledgeable users can edit the code to their own taste and needs and fix bugs [15].…”

“…According to [14], FOSS promotes easy access to intellectual property and allows benefits from it being free. Since the source codes are accessible publicly, experience users can adjust to their specific needs and fix bugs once detected [15].…”

“…Shaame et al [26] mentioned that few of the risk in adopting FOSS in higher institutions are lack of support, review licensing software models, ability to know the origination of a problem and be able to fix it. Among the disadvantages of FOSS as mentioned by various authors are poor user support, lack of documentation, fragmentation of software, and lack of awareness [14], [15].…”

Enablers of Open Source Software adoption: A case study of APS organisations

“…While other research identified inhibitors to OSS adoption within organisations (Goode, 2005;Haider and Koronios, 2009). Literature based on OSS research has identified OSS adoption depends on critical factors such as licence fee (Hwang, 2005), budgetary reasons (Ghosh, 2005), cost reasons (Holck et al, 2005;Mtsweni and Biermann, 2008), availability of source code and security (Ven and Verelst, 2006), availability of external support (Lorraine and Patrick, 2007;Mtsweni and Biermann, 2008;Haider and Koronios, 2009), maintenance and economic benefits to the nation (Haider and Koronios, 2009). …”