“The adoption of open-source software in governments has had its ups and downs. While open source seems like a “no-brainer”, it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons. Federico González Waite spoke in the Open Government track at SCALE 22x in Pasadena, California to recount his experiences working with and for the Mexican government. He led multiple projects to switch away from proprietary, often predatory, software companies with some success—and failure.”
More open source progress, although it also faced its challenges. The lessons learnt are especially interesting. The first lesson mentioned is especially true: The regulations around open source helped a lot, “because it gave a legal framework to explain to people why we were doing stuff”, but it was not enough.
South Africa’s own open source project had similar Cabinet level policy signed off, but the entire project floundered in the late 2000s. What is worrying is that Mexico may face a similar challenge, as they’ve also had a change of administration. In South Africa’s case, and a number of key political leaders changed, and suddenly the focus was elsewhere.
Our lesson learnt was you need to progress as quickly as possible to secure your ground before changes come. Don’t ever assume you’ve gained the high ground. Unfortunately in government, a change of leadership, often means no continuity in projects as the change wants to prove their own new visions, and are not keen to make a previous leaderships projects a success. That, and Big Tech will apply pressure at a political level, and not at an IT level, where they will typically meet their match.
So far, BRIC of the BRICS countries have all made very good progress on their own open source projects, but S has sadly lagged behind. I’m still hoping the success of these projects will rub off on S too, one day.