Abstract
There is a migration from proprietary software
development tools to open source software (OSS) in many
industries, but this transition has been slow in the South African
mining industry. There is minimal evidence of any research on
OSS in South Africa and even less in the South African mining
industry. Through semi-structured interviews with IT managers
at one of the largest mining groups in South Africa, we explored
the OSS tools being used, the benefits of these tools and the
obstacles to OSS adoption using the technology-organizationenvironment
(TOE) framework. We found that there is a growing
interest in adopting OSS tools but that security concerns, lack
of control, support, maintenance issues and intellectual property
concerns hinder adoption. This research can assist practitioners
and researchers in the change management necessary to facilitate
OSS adoption specific to mining, and it can provide a baseline
for future research in OSS in mining, as current literature is
scant.