About
bika (bi:ka Zulu) report, from clan to clan, bring news of weddings, births, festivals and funerals. tell it as it is
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Roots
The Bika Open Source LIMS project started out as prototype, Bach, piloted in the Western Cape wine industry in 2001
Given the cost of unwieldy pre-Internet proprietary systems, no affordable, easy-to-use LIMS and instrument integration systems were available
Web clients were becoming popular but few LIMS were web based, if so, merely web enabled legacy systems. And none were Open Source
Bika 1, built form the ground up in modern web application server and CMS framework Zope and Plone, went into production in 2004 with first public release in 2005
It saw continuous incremental growth through major releases Inkosi 'Chief' LIMS 2 and Gaob 'King' LIMS 3
Bika LIMS 4 design evolved into Senaite LIMS 1, with new name and big refactoring and performance enhancements
Today Bika LIMS uses Senaite at its core and expands functionality through a number of powerful add-ons. Bika is arguably the best Open Source LIMS available, sustained by a collective of users, developers and sponsors unwavering in their efforts to keep to professional standards and away from proprietary pricing models
The software's future is ensured with effective organisational structure and global participation, expanding with the support of client sponsors, peer review by co-developers, and testing by established user base
Holism. Ethos
Bika aims to fulfil laboratory requirements holistically, with full lab system ownership and complete knowledge transfer to staff
This propagates the system to everybody's benefit
Open Source contributes to resource poor local economies, directly through savings in license fees, and indirectly through the benefit of skills development, doing away with the black boxes of conventional proprietary, closed-source information technology
* Holism and Evolution (1926) by another famous African, Gen J. C. Smuts:
The tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution.
After Einstein studied "Holism and Evolution" he wrote that two mental constructs will direct human thinking in the next millennium, his own of relativity and Smuts' of holism.
Inter-disciplinary software activism? Holism