Linux Professional Association of Kenya

The First Kenya Open Source Awards ceremony was successfully held at the Panafric Hotel on 27th May 2009. The event was attended by among others Dr. Bitange Ndemo, the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Information and Communication, and Mr paul Kukubo, the Chief Executive Officer, Kenya ICT Board.

Other notable guests were as follows:

The first ever Kenya Open Source Awards will be held at the Panafric Hotel, Nairobi, on 27th May, 2009.

The purpose of this awards ceremony is to appreciate with recognition Kenya open source contributors who have  made an impact in the open source community both locally and globally with their innovative solutions.

The Linux Professional Association of Kenya has been picked as the country contacts for the ict@innovation, a joint project of Inwent of Germany and FOSSFA. This was done at a meeting between LPA members and project managers from Germany and South Africa. The ict@innovation African Project Coordinator, George Nyambuya, relayed this information at the the Nairobi secretariat of of the LP, in a meeting that was also attended by Evans Ikua, the LPA Chairman, Barrack Otieno, the LPA Secretary, and Balthas Seibold, a senior projects manager with Inwent, Germany, among others.

Written by Okuttah Mark From the Business Daily tuesday 11th Sept. 2007

11-September-2007: Use of open source instead of proprietary software could save consumers millions of shillings in ICT costs, an umbrella organisation of software vendors says. Mr Evans Ikua , the chairman of Linux Professional Association of Kenya, says adopting free open source software (FOSS) would enable big consumers such as the Government and corporations to save money they can invest on other activities.

By James Archibald
23 August, 2007 from http://www.tectonic.co.za

Doctor Daniel Mashao, the chief technology officer at Sita (the South African State Information Technology Agency), announced the launch of the government-wide free and open source programme at the GovTech conference on Thursday.

The LPA will be holding a symposium during the Software Freedom Day from 14th to 15th September 2007 at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC). The theme for this symposium will be: Empowering all people to freely connect, create and share in a digital world that is participatory, transparent, and sustainable.

FOSSFA'S CALL to:

African Heads of State
African Policy Makers
All Africans

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa – FOSSFA, on the occasion of the Software Freedom Day 2006 wishes to reiterate that African development is first the duty of Africans and African governments.

Briefly, FOSS programs are programs whose licenses give users the freedom to run the program for any purpose, to study and modify the program (Source Code), and to redistribute copies of either the original or modified program (without having to pay royalties to previous developers).
Linux is a computer operating system just like Microsoft Windows and Unix. The Linux operating system is a free and open source software. Linux as a platform embodies the rest of the programs that are considered FOSS.