Another public library system begins the transition to open source! The city of Cape Town and South Africa's State Information Technology Agency (SITA) are planning joint development of a new, open-source integrated library system. Apparently they're trying to do this to save money, which is always a risky proposition.
Let me summarize the strategy for you:
- Spend lots of money on developing open-source software
- Spend lots of money on training people to use and maintain open-source software
- Get other libraries to use open-source software too
- …
- PROFIT!!!
Now the serious analysis. From what I've been able to gather, PALS was originally developed by the University of Minnesota, but SITA now owns the South African license. PALS is a consortial system whereby different library catalogs live on the same computer and can share information but have their own collections, policies, etc. The city of Cape Town pays SITA about R2.5 million every year in transaction fees,
which seems to be how pricing is determined on PALS.
Some cost savings will come from using open-source operating systems and other software, and according to this article, SITA has stated that it wants to move to open-source on a national scale in order to save money on licensing fees. That's a viable option when open-source solutions are already available, but open-source is not cheap if you have to develop it yourself. I suspect that the development cost will be more than the R3 million to R4 million that they estimate, and I also doubt that maintenance costs will be significantly less than with PALS. Unless SITA is paying licensing fees that aren't mentioned in the article, I don't see why maintenance costs would change at all.
On the other hand, the project is only in the planning stages, and the article's author doesn't seem very clueful (he refers to Microsoft hardware
instead of software). It is possible that he got other, important facts wrong or that the problems I mentioned will be worked out later in the project. In any case, it will be an interesting project to watch. I wish I could find any other information about it.
Via LISNews.