Barriers and Enablers of OSS-on-the-Desktop Adoption

This paper aims to identify the barriers and enablers to the adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) on the desktop by looking at a specific case namely Ninham Shand, a South African organisation. The study found that computer users and managers concur that reduction in costs was the biggest enabler for the adoption of OSS, and that the computer users were more concerned about the product functionality than technical support. The research also confirmed that the ignorance of OSS amongst computer users was a barrier to the adoption in Ninham Shand. The study has not succeeded in proving that business units that had used OSS perceive the barriers to adoption differently to business units that had used Proprietar