Skills development should be government's number one focus, with open source playing a key role in providing access to the required educational tools and resources, says Shuttleworth Foundation CEO Mark Shuttleworth.
Speaking at GovTech 2007, in Cape Town this morning, Shuttleworth said the development focus should not be job-creation, which has limited impact. It should rather focus on wealth-creation, which involves the development of high-impact jobs that will increase productivity and improve the lives of citizens, he said.
"ICT is key to the wealth-creation strategy."
However, the greatest challenge SA faces is the availability of the required skills, said Shuttleworth. "If you don't have the skills to turn access to software into value for the company or country, you will not get any productivity gains, which further impacts on wealth-creation objectives."
The South African government is lagging behind countries that announced their open source intentions around the same time SA made its announcement, he said. This has, in turn, affected companies' willingness to invest in open source platforms and associated skills.
Future leaders
Shuttleworth argued that open source provides the best opportunity to offer resources for skills development. "If you want to produce an engineer, you have to train him to be able to use a wide variety of engineering tools, and there is no other effective way to make them available than on an open source platform."
Open source is not only about access to tools, it also provides access to the people behind the tools and the community interested in the subject, he said.
On a personal level, Shuttleworth said open source gave him the tools to Internet and cryptology resources, and connected him to great minds. This eventually led to the success of Thawte Technology, which he sold for $575 million in 1999.
Shuttleworth says he is not the only ICT entrepreneur to benefit from resources provided by open source. The founders of Google also said they had the same experience of learning from the great minds associated with open source.
He pointed out that the majority of innovative platforms, including Amazon and Google, were built on open source.
Shuttleworth, who regards China as the world's economic powerhouse, said all the top universities in China use open source platforms to provide resources for their students. This gives China's future technology leaders access to a much broader set of tools.
Some caution
Companies have not invested heavily in open source skills yet because government has not issued a demand for this. "Government has not put out a clear 'for sale' sign," Shuttleworth said.
The reason for current high service costs is because open source traditionally attracted only the best and brightest minds in technology, as it was not part of mainstream thinking, he noted. As a result, demand far exceeded supply.
However, as it gains mainstream recognition, companies will become more willing to invest in the required skills, growing the pool of available engineers and bringing service costs down, he said.
State IT Agency acting CEO Peter Pedlar said, while he supported an open source strategy as a development tool, there were still concerns regarding high service costs and interoperability with other systems.
Pedlar noted that SITA would give a progress report on government's open source initiatives today.
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