Open Source (and PostgreSQL) in South Africa

I was at a very interesting meeting at the CSIR (Council for Science and
Industry Research) on Friday. The CSIR is the one of the main players in
developing suitable technology for the South African and African markets.
With the high level of interest in open source in the .za government, the
CSIR has taken upon themselves to start at home and look at all their
internal systems and see what can be switched to open source systems and
platforms.

The meeting I was in, was about their internal systems (currently Oracle
Workflow and PeopleSoft running on Oracle) and how they can switch as much
of the systems over to Open Source. They made it very clear that their
purpose with this was not saving money, rather to experience the
possibilities first hand so they can be a source of information on how to
do it (or not to do it) in Africa.

One of the main messages that was given to the PeopleSoft representative
was that they would like to see their software running on PostgreSQL!

Other interesting things that came to light was that one of their
divisions had already developed workflow applications for clients (eg. the
University of Pretoria) that was originally developed on postgres but
deployed on Oracle for the clients. They would investigate if the clients
would be interested in open sourcing the developments and the looking at
that as an alternative for their internal Oracle workflow use.

The CSIR has recently launched an Open Source Centre
(http://www.csir.co.za/plsql/ptl0002/PTL0002_PGE100_LOOSE_CONTENT?LOOSE_PAGE_NO=7127887)
and are keen to look at ways to improve the use of and contribution to
Open Source in general.

My company (Obsidian Systems) does Open Source (mainly Linux) support,
training and development and we have been getting quite a few requests
for PostgreSQL training. These movements from the CSIR is sure to increase
that demand.

Anton