Govt OSS migration will need skills

Governments looking to migrate to open source software (OSS) will need to ramp up their internal skills base, according to Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio. Di Maio, speaking at the Gartner Symposium in Cape Town on Tuesday, also said that migrating to open source software should be done in a phased manner, moving entire groups of users to open source software at a time. Di Maio said that over time organisations had become reliant on external skills in their operations as they moved through packaged software and application service providers. Moving to open source software would reverse that trend, he said.