By Our Reporter
Increased awareness, integration and adoption of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in Uganda, both by government and the private sector is key to improving service delivery. It will reduce cost of public service delivery as well as improve competitiveness of Uganda’s ICT and ICT Enabled Services (ITES). This is according to Frank Tumwebaze, Uganda’s ICT and National Guidance Minister.
He was speaking at the 7th African Conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons-IDLELO 7 at Speke Resort Munyonyo where he said, “As Uganda seeks to increase her share of the global ICT/ITES, there is need to find new ways of doing business and FOSS presents fresh opportunities for the country. As a government, we are very serious on improving service delivery to our people and this requires that we look into more affordable means of serving our people. Presently, government has been spending over US$ 40 million annually on commercial software from the likes of Oracle Systems and Microsoft Corporation. Adopting the use of FOSS, will result into enormous savings that can be re-injected into other under-funded areas.”
Tumwebaze added that ICT has received the backing of the highest political leadership and currently features predominantly in the 23 national priorities for the next five years. This was recently adopted by Cabinet as an extension of the 17 priorities pronounced by the President upon acceptance of this new five year mandate.
The conference which ends today is being held under the theme, ‘Open Source Solutions for Open Government and Open Data in Africa’. It brings together a line-up of over 200 participants working on FOSS projects, platforms and rapidly evolving social network tools and applications. It is sponsored by the National Information Technology Uganda (NITA-U) in association with the Ministry of ICT and the Free Open Source Software Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA).
“As an emerging economy, in our vision 2040, we have set ambitious targets to substantially increase the proportion of ICT goods to total exports from below 5% to 40% by 2040 and this requires a significant shift in the way we approach ICT investments as a country. We need to benchmark against countries such as Malaysia, who by promoting FOSS, have been able to reduce software costs significantly by 80% on licensing fees, 58% in software development and 7% on software support services totaling an overall cost reduction of 30.5% in 2006. Today Malaysia’s proportion of ICT goods to total exports stands at an astronomical 45%,” Tumwebaze stated.
A 2012 survey by NITA showed that the top 5 computer applications used by government and the private sector were all proprietary software. Most respondents reported on using mostly Microsoft operating systems with Windows XP and Windows 7 being used by 58% and 56% respectively. Microsoft Office is used by 66% of respondents, while Kaspersky was the antivirus software solution of choice with 44% reporting its usage. Microsoft SQL Server was the preferred server solution.
James Saaka, the Executive Director NITA said that despite the enormous economic and developmental benefits of FOSS acceptance levels were still low.
“Today, there exists several popular, high quality, secure and easily customizable FOSS applications such as WordPress, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Open Office and VLC compatible to the Windows and MAC OS environment. These can and should be adopted to be able to save on both costs of acquisition and maintenance and then re-directing these savings to other areas,” he said.
The ICT Ministry has already developed a FOSS Policy and Strategy to provide guidance on the deployment of Open Source Software and the use of Open Standards in government.