Government is increasingly using open source solutions, or hybrid models that combine it with some proprietary software, while commercial organisations are still proprietary-oriented, says David Jacobs, Consequent technical director.
Speaking at a Cape IT Initiative debate on open source, Jacobs said that as open source standards are adopted, especially by the large players, other organisations will adopt the technology.
"Google has been throwing its weight behind a number of open source standards. For instance, in the messaging area they adopted the XMPP standard and this has become widely used. Similarly, other standards for infrastructure development have also been adopted."
Jacobs noted the adoption of open source solutions is not only a matter of avoiding licensing fees.
"We developed an application for the city of Amsterdam and then delivered it over the Web and then charge per transaction, or per month."
Jacobs suggested the big municipalities of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town should work with small companies to develop and deploy open source solutions and then help the smaller municipalities in a cascading approach. The smaller municipalities should use other small companies to support the solution.
Jacobs added that software as a service works best where the client base has a "long-tail", which is a mix of a handful of big clients, and a larger number of mid-market and smaller players.
"With this construction, it is a win-win for all three players: the software vendor gets an initial set of large clients to fund the project. The larger clients get more features than they would just doing a custom development, and the smaller clients get to use a product they could never afford to build themselves."
Obsidian director Anton de Wet says the need for business matchmakers will continue as the open source community grows in order to link customers with the growing developer base.
These matchmakers, whom he calls "beekeepers", will match what the businesses want with what the companies need.
"It's clear that the open source movement has gone far beyond the Web page development stage, which is set to revolutionise communication," De Wet says.
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