The Nigerian Mirror project that aims to provide a local mirror of popular opensource projects in Nigeria has gone live. Sponsored by web hosting firm Web4Africa, the project aims to provide very fast, low-latency access to commonly used opensource software projects.
According to Web4Africa, Nigerian Mirror Project is the first of its type in the West African sub-region. It is physically hosted in Nigeria and reachable at mirror.ng. The project will provide easy access to free and opensource software in Nigeria.
Web4Africa’s aim is to reduce the high cost by bringing free and open-source content closer to end-users in Nigeria. Another benefit of this project is low latency. By bringing the content closer to the user, downloads are faster. Developers using open-source programming languages and users of Linux Operating Systems in Nigeria are among the direct beneficiaries of this project, provided their Internet Service Provider peers openly at the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN).The mirror is presently hosting the full repositories of Ubuntu and CentOS (both Linux Operating Systems), as a well as Python Package Index (a programming language), in Nigeria. The project has official recognition from CentOS and Ubuntu respectively as it has already been integrated into their official distribution network.
