Earlier this year, between 26th - 29th August, the inaugural East African Conference on Open Source was held at the United States International University, Nairobi - which brought together various African open source community players to discuss industry trends, create new collaborations and witness the release of the use of open source software in Kenya report.
The Open Source movement which incorporates free and open source software (FOSS), open source technologies and the creative commons has been growing in Kenya and Africa as a whole over the last few years. While this is a great improvement from just several years back, we will not see open source adoption growth to the level of proprietary software development until we explore economic models for open source in Africa.
In this post we will explore the certain recurring factors that if addressed could bring us closer to determing the best economic model for Free Software creation and adoption. These factors include:
- Identifying current economic models of Free Software
- Create a greater clarity regarding the market
- Exploring the roles of companies, associations and professionals
- Barries to Using FOSS
Identifying Current Economic Models of Free Software
Africa continues to make substantial strides in the creation and use of FOSS. In a short time span the ecosystem of stakeholders that utilize Free Software technology continues to grow. These stakeholders include publishers, research laboratories, training institutes, manufacturers, online service providers and even specialized service companies.
The use of Free Software is known to reduce the time to market of a solution and improves productivity of the digital economy at minimal organization. This should encourage key industry players to work together to build on the fundamental qualities of Free Software and to develop economic models that work best for different types of activities.
Currently there's various initiatives and projects on the continent that demonstrate that many FOSS activities are underway in terms of capacity building, development and usage, educational and business application, policy implementation and more. The increase in these initiatives illustrates a gradual, yet significant shift in focus from proprietary software to FOSS solutions and services.
Clarifying FOSS Market in Africa
Africa is one of the fastest growing markets for open source software. Development and increased access to the internet is one of the catalysts to the accceleration of this market. As more people get connected to the internet and develop software and other internet based solutions other factors that will trigger the adoption of FOSS is the need for higher productivity.
Before we can clearly map out the market and market opportunities for FOSS in Africa we need to understand the relational chain of Free Software creation and distribution and the typology of the economic models that they incorporate. In a report recently released by Market US they covered several aspects of this relational chain by pinpointing its many subsegments, profiling the important players and their growth plans and listed several predictions in this market through to 2028.
For the African market, the factors that will motivate people to become involved in FOSS include:
- Easily available learning resources to use FOSS
- Availability of good job offers due to FOSS involvement
- Ability to customize software to suit needs for the African Market
- Frequent high quality Open Source workshops, seminars or conferences
- Ability to use software without proprietary copyright infringements
Without placing a specific monetary value of this market, its not a stretch to point out that as more Africans come online, and interact with open source technologies that this market will continue to exponentially grow and with that a clear definitions of the roles of key players needs to be determined.
Exploring Roles of Key Players
In this section we will focus on the roles of several types of key players and by understanding their roles, demonstrate how the Free Software industry will be able to enter a new phase of growth, restructuring and consolidation. We'll start by exploring programmers incentives, highlighting the principles of digital development and a deep dive into commercial software companies' open source strategies.
What motivates programmers to contribute to open source projects
Every software development project generates a variety of costs and benefits to the programmers involved. In exchange for time spent building a solution, fixing a bug or customizing a solution - a programmer can receive a monetary compensation in a closed source project, or improve the experience for themselves and other users in the case of open source solutions.
Since commercial software companies can produce softwares that can be easily monetized to generate income, they currently have an edge in the monetary compensation front of software development. This seeming upperhand has over the years led to increasing use of software patenting and proprietary software releases to be the standard for software development. As the FOSS standard has grown over time, programmers have developed new sets of incentives alongside monetary compensation.
While monetary compensation is not an obvious incentive for majority of programmers contributing to FOSS, for African developers, designing a contribution model that incorporate monetary compensation as one of the deferred benefits to be a frequent contributor or maintainer will go a long way to increasing the number of developers in this space.
Leadership, organization and governance
In the early days of FOSS development, industry contributors struggled with the fragmented and uncoordinated nature of the industry. Over time implementators designed various tools, standards and best practices guide for the use of ICT tools for Free Software development.
Any economic model designed for use in Africa should use tools that help realize the full potential of ICTs. One such tool is the Principles for Digitial Development, a guideline that helps practitioners and implementors integrate best practices. Some of these principles state we should:
- Develop software to be open source by default with the code made available in public repositories and supported through developer communities.
- Open data and functionalities and expose them in documented Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) where use by a larger community is possible.
- Adopt and expand existing open standards.
- Invest in software as a public good.
It might appear at first sight that the unconstrained, quasi-anarchistic nature of the open source process leaves little scope for a leadership. This, however, is incorrect by participating and giving back to this community we support and sustain the rich ecosystem of tools and products that they have developed to improve the lives of people around the world.
Commercial software companies' open source strategies
As should be expected, many commercial companies have elaborated strategies to capitalize on the open source movement. In a nutshell, they expect to benefit from their expertise in some segment whose demand is boosted by the success of a complementary open source program. Beyond the benefits commercial software companies derive from open source technology, they can contribute to the definition of economic models for this market.
One such contribution that is straightforward, these companies can provide complementary services and products that are not supplied efficiently by the open source community. A participating commercial company may still want to encourage and subsidize the open source movement, for example by allocating a few programmers to the open source project. They can commit to the idea that software innovations should be shared with the development community that made delivering our products possible.
Barriers to FOSS growth in Africa
As key stakeholders its our duty to identify and overcome several obstacles the Free Software industry is facing and will continue to face.
- The Software Patent
- Lack of FOSS general awareness and its advantages
- Resistance to switch from proprietary platforms/ softwares
- Technical competence required in the use of FOSS
- Open Source project life span - lack of maintenance support
- The Internet issue
Ultimately, Africa is a positive environment for the further uptake of FOSS. We have practical use cases to illustrate public and private sectors can utilise FOSS technology to drive innovation and vital service delivery to a vast number of people across the continent.