South Africa has a window of opportunity of between five to 10 years to develop an open source skills base and become a key player in the global open source software market before proprietary systems such as Microsoft make their response, says Internet millionaire Mark Shuttleworth.
Shuttleworth was in Cape Town yesterday to address "The Big Idea" conference for entrepreneurship, organised by his venture capital company Here Be Dragons.
"I built Thawte using open source technology, so I now feel a kind of obligation to the open source community," he said. Thawte Consulting was the name of Shuttleworth`s Internet trust certification business, which he sold to US company Verisign in February 2000.
"Microsoft have not yet made their response to open source, and I can`t wait until they do. Bill Gates is an extremely clever person and is not given enough credit for his capabilities," he said.
He told ITWeb that overseas universities and other institutions of higher learning are using open source software extensively, especially in their education and research and development centres.
"We are beginning to see open source being used more extensively by those institutions on the front-end and the client side of their systems as well."
Shuttleworth hopes to encourage local South African universities to implement open source software solutions and his Shuttleworth Foundation has a primary aim of encouraging the use of open source in schools so that children learn it at an early age.
The Internet as a business model has not collapsed, although a more realistic set of expectations have come into it, Shuttleworth noted. "As a commerce platform, it is working. A simple measure is the increasing number of trust certificates being sold by Thawte (Verisign)."
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