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Jamaica's Minister of Science, Energy and Technology, Dr. Andrew Wheatley, M.P., has announced a move towards greater emphasis on Free and Open Source Software within the Jamaican government:
Minister of Science, Energy and Technology today outlined the Government of Jamaica’s intention to pursue greater use of Open Source Software as part of its thrust to transform ICT within government while at the same time reducing the attendant costs associated with the use of proprietary software.
Open Source Software is computer software that is distributed with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose
Several agencies will draft a plan together for the adoption and migration of the government platforms to FOSS.
From the Jamaican government's Jamaica Information Service : Government of Jamaica to Actively Pursue Greater Use of Open Source Software – Wheatley
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pav on Monday March 19 2018, @12:05AM (1 child)
Microsoft really REALLY doesn't like governments moving to F/OSS. Munich certainly showed that. It was pretty remarkable that even CEO Balmer was part of the effort to get them to switch back. In the end it took a change of government, and Microsoft to commit to move their new German corporate headquarters to Munich to sweeten the deal enough. I think also Vista (hospital software developed for the US VA) has also been discontinued because of anti F/OSS government lobbying, although hopefully it will live on as WorldVista which is already used in many countries including my own (ie. Australia).
I haven't played with LiMux (the software Munich uses), but I have played with a close relative called Fusion Directory [fusiondirectory.org]. It is an LDAP front end, and of course LDAP integrates with a LOT of services. Central sign on and email of course, and management of lots of the usual network services (DNS, DHCP, VoIP, Samba, options for groupare - my favourite being SoGO, etc... etc...) and user metadata, but I was most interested in managing software installations. This wasn't just dumb imaging, but multi-os management of software suites after the base OS was remotely installed. These could be added or removed to groups or individual systems eg. software suites/roles for drafting, town planning, finance etc... The high level management was done in LDAP, and the grunt work was done by software called OPSI (for the Windows side of things) and FAI (Fully Automatic Installer) for Linux, though I think the industry eventually went with Puppet etc... (which seemed less elegant to me). I believe Fusion Directory integrates with Puppet also btw... I haven't played with this software in quite some time, so I'm unsure how things might have developed since then. I do know that if software supports LDAP it's relatively easy to add a management front end, and due to the Unix philosophy, even a non-LDAP supporting service can often be made to support LDAP fairly easily.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @01:05PM
My experience is that by simply justifying the use of an open source library when it is clearly the better solution will result in the politically entrenched Microsoft minions to actively try to get you fired.
There are two types of criminals; those who operate outside the law, and those who buy them.