I received an email from Web4Africa, yesterday and in it was a news announcement that it has launch the “first FOSS mirror in west Africa at miror.ng”. The happy thing about it is that the project is physically hosted (located) in Nigeria. For those of you who do not know, Web4Africa is a reputable domain name registrar and web hosting company based in Lagos Nigeria and Johannesburg South Africa.
The main reason given for this development is to provide a platform where free and open source software could be easily accessible and available at increased download speed. Hmm…that’s very nice.
We all know (at least those of us living here) that internet cost is very high in country and bandwidth is very expensive, especially when compared to other parts of the world. Also, most of the web content are generated (and mostly hosted) outside the country. So to reduce this cost, Web4Africa has decided to bring free and open source content closer to end users in Nigeria. This would lead to faster downloads. As a pilot phase the full repositories of two Linux distributions Ubuntu and CentOS, and Python Package Index (a programming language extension) are currently being hosted at mirror.ng.
Web4Africa is currently accepting suggestions regarding which other FOSS to mirror in Nigeria at: admin(at)mirror(dot)ng.
This is a wonderful news for the Nigerian FOSS community in general and FossNaija in particular – because that is where fossnaija.com was registered.
Yeah , cheers!!!!
Happy Linux’NG!
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