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In the knowledge economy, organisations are shifting their investment focus from natural resources to intellectual capital, in order to sustain a competitive advantage in the global marketplace. Organisational survival is increasingly dependent on the organisation's ability to create knowledge that contributes to performance improvement. The purpose of this article is to qualitatively evaluate knowledge acquisition practices in the South African public sector. The researcher applied grounded theory analysis techniques to extract themes that could provide insight into knowledge acquisition that takes place in the South Africa public sector, even though these practices are not documented as knowledge transfer practices. Findings revealed that informal sharing of knowledge take place in discussion forums within communities of practice. These communities of practice are widespread throughout the public sector, and are established with the purpose of soliciting expert knowledge from those who have been using open source software successfully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South African Government adopted a policy for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) migration in the public sector in 2003. This FOSS policy was extended to include open content in 2006. Notwithstanding, levels of FOSS adoption within the public sector in South Africa are still low (Mosoval et al., 2006; Mtsweni & Bierman, 2008). Although a number of papers have been written on FOSS, there is not enough literature discussing its actual implementation of FOSS (Waring & Maddock, 2005). This paper adopts a strategic management perspective to discussing FOSS migration within the South African public sector. The organic model for strategic management developed by Farjoun (2002) is use to demonstrate implications for FOSS migration amongst all South African Government Departments (includes more than 1000 sites). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]