Open source software benefits professionals in all industries: government, Internet, business, education, and even health care. Expensive software and subscriptions for anti virus systems, supporting electronic medical records and even phone or e-mail communications can put on a strain on small clinics as well as larger hospitals.

German Development Organization InWEnt is partnering with FOSSFA (The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa" ) on a new training and networking programme called "ict@innovation". Both partners signed an according Letter of Intent at the third African Conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons – Idlelo 3.

Or at least it will be if Open Health Tools, a new project to create standards and interoperable systems for accessing electronic health records, is a success.

DataDyne.org's work in Zambia, switching all health care surveys from paper to pda with the help of the open source EpiSurveyor!

"To provide quality healthcare services, healthcare providers need to share information whenever they require. In a closed environment, the interfacing issue between disparate systems has been an obstacle for communication and information sharing," said Joseph D. Dal Molin, secretary of the Open Source Health Care Alliance.

The health care sector is set for a technology-driven transformation as the federal government pushes adoption of electronic health records and pursues national health information exchange. Hardly surprising, the Open Source Convention (OSCON) has a health care track. But will health care IT consultants embrace open source? Here's an overview.

A leading provider of open source solutions, Red Hat Inc. continues to support organizations with a varied business demand in the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. IT based organizations are aggressively adopting Red Hat’s open solutions and Virtualization technology to grow their businesses.

Ubuntu founder and IT entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth tells Computing SA that picking open source software was not only good for South Africa but also important for the rest of the African continent.

The educational community has discovered open source tools in a big way. Analysts predict that schools will spend up to $489.9 million on support and services for open source software by 2012, and that only includes charges related to operating systems and learning management systems.