Publication: A Review of Users Adoption of Open Source Software in Africa
Total Views 2
total viewsTotal Downloads 75
total downloadsDate
2012
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Canadian Center of Science and Education
Cite this Item
Abstract
In the current world, software is increasingly becoming important in the human activity. It is widely recognised that Open Source software (OSS) is freely available to anyone who needs it. However, loyalty of computer users to proprietary operating systems and general office applications seems to be still high especially in developing countries. OSS has a great potential of saving costs for developing economies in Africa and reducing the cost of doing business and automating operations. The software would be very useful especially in the current period of economic hardships being faced by many developing countries. African governments have also not taken the lead in adopting the OSS software and many do not have policies in place regarding it.
A review of literature on studies conducted in Africa on OSS in order to establish the level of user adoption, possible barriers to OSS adoption in developing countries in Africa is done in this paper. The findings are of great value to all stakeholders, namely the software developers, policy makers and computer experts in their endeavour to achieve high user adoption of OSS.
Description
Keywords
open source software, Developing countries, Adoption