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ict@innovation

The ict@innovation programme builds capacities in African small and medium ICT enterprises to make a business with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). ict@innovation aims to encourage the growth of African ICT industries, particularly in Southern and East Africa, through three main actions: spreading FOSS business models for enterprises in Africa, fostering FOSS certification and supporting innovative local FOSS applications for social and economic development. ict@innovation is a partnership of FOSSFA and InWEnt.

Find out more, contact us, join the programme, and/or create your profile on the ict@innovation community portal.

Join FOSS-Discuss

FOSSFA (Free Software and Open Source Foundation of Africa) has launched a New Mailing list "fossdiscuss@fossfa.net" that is managed by FOSSFA Members. The following are some of the features of the list:

* Free Membership
* Any one can join
* Accepts questions from people around the world
* Aims to answer FOSS questions by FOSSFA community and experts
* Language facilitation in French
* Share project ideas
* Get professional FOSS advice

Click here if you want to subscribe to the list.
What is Free Software? Print E-mail
Free/libre and Open Source Software, or FLOSS, can be loaded onto your computer for free (legally) or at a very low cost - plus you can copy it and share it with your friends and colleagues without having to worry about breaking the law. One well-known example of a FLOSS application is the Internet browser Firefox, which can be downloaded from the Web free of charge. And an alternative operating system to Windows is the many variations 7 07 of Linux available for free.

The alternative to FLOSS is proprietary or ‘closed source’ software, such as the widely used MS Office, for example, for which you would pay a purchase price as well as a licence fee per copy. The licensing conditions mean that you are not allowed to make copies of the software or share it with other people. FLOSS is also distributed with a licence, but that licence generally encourages users to share the software.

Essentially, two things separate ‘open source’ software from proprietary or ‘closed source’ software. Firstly, open source is free from software licence fees and, secondly, the source code (the code developers wrote to create the software) is always made available for anyone to view and modify. This means that everyone has the right to contribute to the software by altering the source code – and there are millions of people in the world who exercise that right. Thanks to this community of enthusiastic developers, open source software is always being improved. Bugs are found and fixed quickly, and security problems are sorted out immediately. With ‘closed source’ software, only programmers employed by the software company that ‘owns’ the source code are allowed to work on it and the source is always hidden from users.

So open source software is defined by the fact that it provides every user with the right to use, modify or change, copy and distribute it. The software is released under a licence (the General Public licence is the best known but there are variations), and it is the licence that provides users with all these rights. It is in this sense that the term ‘free’ applies to FLOSS – it means you are free to exercise all your rights. This can sometimes be confusing for people, because open source software is not necessarily always available for ‘no charge’ and not all free software is open source. A commonly used analogy is that ‘open source is like free speech, not free beer’.

• Sources:

1. Open Source, Open Ear. Go Open Source Campaign, www/go-opensource.org

2. Free/Open Source Software. A general introduction. By Kenneth Wong and Phet Sayo, UNDP-APDIP 2004

available from the International Open Source Network website at:

http://www.iosn.net/downloads/foss_primer_current.pdf