System – Prince Mhlaba
*overnment Act to administer it.
Based on the current country s Con stitution with regard to local govern ment election, he said it Murisdiction ally still fell for execution exclusively under the Urban *overnment Act by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.
The chairman said the ministry would conduct the elections until a subsidiary legislation to the Constitu tion was enacted, expressly conferring Murisdiction for the local government elections to EBC.
“As this subsidiary legislation is still not in place, EBC accepted the legal position as stipulated by the court Mudgment and agreed to provide the technical support EBC had always provided in the past,” he said.
In )ebruary 2022, the election man agement system that was developed by Slomoes Corporation for the 2018 national elections was handed over to the EBC.
The handover took place at the EBC Offices in Nkhanini, Lobamba.
On that occasion, the prince said the cost of the software and hardware was plus or minus E18 million.
Now, the question is why didn’t
Slomoes Corporation handover the source code to the EBC" The Times SUNDAY has been made aware that the source code is an intellectual prop erty. It remains with the programmer as its sole property ± and that it uses it to develop the software.
Sources within 5STP said the source code is like a key to the house. They said the EBC should have inserted a clause in the contract that the vendor should handover the source code, even though it would have been very expen sive for the commission to acquire it.
Who owns the source code?
In an article published by Startup *rind, 5ich )oreman, the founder of KidneyLuv which develops solu tions for patients with chronic kidney disease, )oreman said a client had developed an app and asked him to do some minor work on their existing application.
Startup said he told the client that he would need access to the source code.
He said his client went back to the original developer to get the source code only to find that code was an intellectual property for the developer and he refused to provide it.
“Unfortunately, this is not the first time I ve seen this source code own ership issue,” )oreman said.
He then mentioned some of the implications of not having the source code –
◗ You are forever tied to the devel oper. Any modification, bug fix, or upgrade has to go through that de veloper. This is problematic because the developer could raise the price of development and is problematic if that developer becomes sick, busy with other proMects, etc.
◗ 5aising funds or selling your proMect becomes more difficult because there’s a question of who owns the intellectual property.
In his simplification of the issue, the founder of KidneyLuv said if he were to hire someone to buy a house, he would want the keys to it at the end of the proMect.
“In a similar fashion, if I pay some one to develop an app for me, I would expect to have the source code upon completion. At Apptology, this is our general policy. The exception is when we develop an app based off one of our templates. In which case, the template is our intellectual property,” he said.
Recommendations
If a company’s app is being de veloped by a contractor, he advised that the firm should have an open discussion about the source code ownership.
Techtarget states that proprietary software vendors like Microsoft don’t share source code with customers for two reasons to protect intellectual property and to prevent the customer from making changes to source code in a way that might break the pro gramme or make it more vulnerable to attack.
Persistent efforts to get hold of Sen]o Mala]a, the Senior Com munication Officer at 5STP, were unsuccessful yesterday.
9umile Dlamini, the 5STP CEO, acknowledged receipt of a copy of a memorandum requesting the Minis try of Information, Communication and Technology for authority to upgrade the election management system (EMS) and the provision of technical support for the 2023 *en eral Election.
Dlamini asked the EBC to share the source code and credentials of the EMS with the 5STP in order to ad vise accordingly and further provide the required support.
“Specialists are available in the or ganisation to assist the commission in interrogating what has been handed
SLOMOES ELECTIONS TENDER;
over by the vendor that provided the 2018 Election Management System,” partly reads the letter from the CEO.
:ithout the source code, sources said the only thing that the EBC or Ministry of Housing and Urban De velopment could do was to pull down the system at a huge cost or reengage the original developer to upgrade it.
It cost EBC a sum of E18 million to set it up. It has been learnt that after the EBC and Ministry of Housing and Urban Development had been turned down by the 5STP because of the absence of the source code, they then engaged Slomoes Corporation.
Slomoes is said to have started working on the system at full scale last month.
Auditor *eneral Timothy Sipho Matsebula has disallowed expend iture for the procurement of the technological solution for the local government elections.
He said he took this decision in accordance with Section 207 (8) of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Eswatini. He said he received a complaint that the Ministry of Hous ing and Urban Development was in the process of engaging Slomoes Corporation (Pty) Ltd to procure the technological solution for the local government elections, using a single sourcing.