South Africa could be the leader of many open-source (OS) initiatives across the globe, but time is running out -- so say the members of the GO Open Source coalition, which held its first task team meeting in Johannesburg last week.

Go Open members, the Shuttleworth Foundation, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Canonical, and the Meraka Institute at the CSIR, met last week to discuss this country?s role in the global OS technology sphere.

?SA has a small window of opportunity to take the lead in driving OS in specific projects around the world, but it needs to make use of the opportunities now,? says Shuttleworth Foundation and Canonical founder, Mark Shuttleworth.

The aim of the conference, according to Shuttleworth, was: ?To bring together people from different government departments, civil society and the private sector, to explore the OS projects that are already underway locally. We also wanted to look at what is happening globally in these fields, and formulate a road map around the core projects that we should be exploring.?

The ultimate aim is to establish some sort of framework, national policy, strategy, or recommendations around OS, to be taken to the Presidential International Advisory Council next month.

The most prominent projects discussed at the conference included OSS in the education space (an urgent priority), wireless technology and free software?s role in connecting rural SA, and open source technology in the arts and culture arena.

There are still many concerns and challenges that have to be faced before this country can constructively contribute to global open source initiatives.

"The number one concern is the availability of skills and certified people. As it happens, SA is not badly off in terms of the availability of talent, but we need to make it a concerted and proactive campaign to get universities to teach and train students on an open platform, and ensure that schools produce kids who are comfortable with an open platform. We also have to make sure that we provide re-certification programs for people who are, for example, Microsoft certified engineers, to get them to become Linux certified engineers.?

The very nature of open source is based on the idea of a free sharing of information and collaborations across borders, but it seems that, in terms of larger global initiatives, very little concrete collaboration is happening.

It also seems people want to get their own houses in order before broadly sharing information on specific initiatives, particularly in the education sector.

Says Shuttleworth: ?International collaboration is not happening that much. There is a commitment to what is known as the South-South collaboration, where southern hemisphere countries work together around OS technology, but it has not really materialized into any concrete projects.?

He believes that SA is at this stage ?playing ?catch-up?,? but hopes that the country will take a leadership approach on specific projects in the future.

?It is not something that is going to happen overnight. That said, in 2006 Microsoft will release the next version of Windows, and I think it is going to be very difficult for the company to sell it as easily as it sold previous versions, because people will, if nothing else, be likely to say, ?let me wait a year and see how the free software has improved?,? he adds.

?We will see how this is evolving over the next couple of years, but I am confident that the world is still moving towards OS,? he concludes.