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South African dairy farmers are starting to use open source software to improve their farming techniques and outputs. ACS Online has developed a range of dairy farming-specific modules using PHP, Apache and MySQL running on Sun boxes with Solaris 9. The modules currently available include financial management, a sustainable pasture management system, livestock management and a performance analysis module which uses the Balanced Scorecard reporting technique.
It once as said (and I agreed) that vertical markets (specialised, limited customer bases) would be one of the last bastions to fall to Open Source, but it turns out to not be true.
The reason for this is not the size of the userbase, but the price tag of the software. Some suppliers (not all) charge their victims an arm and a leg for software which is not intrinsically special or magic, and then go on charging them an arm and a leg and in many cases respond sluggishly if at all to user requests. It often gets to the point where it's cheaper for the end-user to either set up something themselves which they own and control, or hire someone to do it for them.
The magic ingredients in Open Source which makes it a catalyst for this are "collaboration" and "components". Since the advent of Open Source as a popular concept, a rapidly snowballing and freely accessible reservoir of examples, prototypes and components has accumulated. Since even the GPL seems to be surviving its trial by fire http://www.groklaw.net/ it has now become "safe" to collaborate.
People in even small industries are getting together, each chipping in a little bit of effort to make a common piece of software which suits them all. Another example which popped up recently is Australian veterinarians. http://www.vetsoft.org.au/
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The reason for this is not the size of the userbase, but the price tag of the software. Some suppliers (not all) charge their victims an arm and a leg for software which is not intrinsically special or magic, and then go on charging them an arm and a leg and in many cases respond sluggishly if at all to user requests. It often gets to the point where it's cheaper for the end-user to either set up something themselves which they own and control, or hire someone to do it for them.
The magic ingredients in Open Source which makes it a catalyst for this are "collaboration" and "components". Since the advent of Open Source as a popular concept, a rapidly snowballing and freely accessible reservoir of examples, prototypes and components has accumulated. Since even the GPL seems to be surviving its trial by fire http://www.groklaw.net/ it has now become "safe" to collaborate.
People in even small industries are getting together, each chipping in a little bit of effort to make a common piece of software which suits them all. Another example which popped up recently is Australian veterinarians. http://www.vetsoft.org.au/