About Bika

bika (bi:ka Zulu) report, from clan to clan, bring news of weddings, births, festivals and funerals. tell it as it is

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, it was clear that no affordable, easy-to-use LIMS and instrument integration systems were available

info@bikalims.org

Web clients were becoming popular but few LIMS were web based, and 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

The system has since seen continuous incremental growth through major releases Inkosi 'Chief' LIMS 2 and Gaob 'King' LIMS 3, including micro-biology and branches for health care, environmental management and inter-laboratory proficiency testing

Senaite

Bika LIMS 4 design evolved into Senaite LIMS 1, with new name and big refactoring and performance enhancements

Today Bika/Senaite LIMS 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 many global developers, in high demand, currently expanding the system with the support of client sponsors, peer review by co-developers, and testing by fast expanding user base

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Holistic FOSS. Ethos

Bika aims to fulfil laboratory requirements holistically, with full system ownership, including the program code, by the lab and complete knowledge transfer to staff

This propagates the system to everybody's benefit without any barriers

Open Source contributes to 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

Bika offers free upgrade paths, no license fees and no vendor lock-in. Systems remain customisable and continue to inherit further enhancements from other contributions free of charge

* 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

Bika does not take on work in the defence industry, and in support of Bishop Tutu's Plea to the people of Israel: Liberate yourselves by liberating Palestine, neither there

Code Analysis

49 Person years in Bika, and 56 more in Senaite (analysed by Blackduck Open Hub)

66 Contributors, representing 400 520 lines of code, mostly JavaScript. A well established, mature code base maintained by a large development team