Evangelizing OSS in the Caribbean

An anonymous reader writes "Here is an article on NewsForge regarding evangelizing OSS in the Caribbean. I'm wondering what others think of the impact efforts like this may have on software development jobs in the US. Is IT still a viable field to get into and if so will it last?"

Comments

Businesses will need programmers.

[janda]

There will always be a business need for programmers to glue software together and create things that nobody else sells or builds.

For example, the IRS changes their reporting requirements every now and then. I don't know of any company that would risk an OSS bug in that kind of software.

There will always be a need for people who can do software upgrades and systems work. A lot of that can't be sent out of the states because of the cost of shipping the computers around.

I know this is not popular round here

[Timesprout]

Not only that, OpenOffice and other Open Source programs can be customized and modified at will -- by local programmers instead of by companies overseas

But one of the reasons MS is achieved so much success is because they made their stuff very easy to extend a long time ago, witness the gazillions of VB coders out there who use MS components in their apps, for example its a doddle to stick another button on to IE and code whatever you want behind it in C++ or VB taking advantage of almost all MS office functionality/disfunctionality depending on your point of view. Jesus the number of people I have seen working in major corps who depend on their self built spreadsheets to get anything done alone defies belief.

I always find this a very disingenuous argument for OSS as it implies MS software cannot be customized when it obviously can. Yes you dont have the source code but the occasions where the OS source is required are few and far between for application developers.

Re:I know this is not popular round here

[Feztaa]

And when you need to send the file to someone else on their computer, they need your modified code, along with the code that someone else hacked together to add something else for another file. And now this middle person has two patches which may be incompatiable.

Right. That's why everybody submits their patches to the original author, who merges them, ensures they are compatible, and releases a new version that works for everybody.

Dah...

[Duncan3]

Is IT still a viable field to get into and if so will it last?

No. Absolutely not.

Alice spends 40 hours a week at work developing databases, and 40 hours a week working on OpenOffice.

Bob spends 40 hours a week at work writing an office suite, and 40 hours a week working on PostgreSQL.

I will use Alice's office suite, and Bob's database.

Think hard: Did you all expect your open source project to put everyone else out of a job but not you?

In-house code

[mccalli]

An awful lot of code is purely for in-house applications. This kind of stuff simply isn't threatened by open source, in fact I think it is helped.

Commoditise all the building blocks you want. Operating systems? Fine. Office applications? Yep - alright. Development tools? Yes please, we like that. When you're finished, you still left with a ton of tools that need plugging together to do useful work for a business.

Now, if your business just needs Office to write letters and send invoices, plus a database to track stock, then you were never in the kind of software market I'm talking about anyway. If, however, you happen to be a multi-national bank needing realtime market data information feeding to custom databases, with their own trading front ends etc. - this kind of stuff is only helped by Open Source. Give us the middleware (in this set-up, the OS and database is almost immaterial) and we'll carry on building the final product thank you. Always plenty of work for developers here.

Cheers,
Ian

Of course IT is still a "viable field"...

[PinglePongle]

for people who are passionate about it. For the "this looks like a good way to make a quick buck" brigade, I think the game is up...

Seriously, I've been through a couple of IT recessions, and it's never pretty. If you're good, care about your work and want to work hard, there are still plenty of opportunities. If you're into IT because it's well paid and involves no heavy lifting, you'll find it hard to get by untill the next boom (I've been through a couple of booms, as well). And in the confusion, lots of good people get laid off, and lots of clowns stay around - it's not fair, not clean and good people get screwed.

So, right now, IT is like most other jobs - if you're good, enjoy the work, and have people-skills, you'll probably be okay. If all you want is a fat paycheck in return for an MCSE, bad attitude and the ability to use TLAs without blushing, no, IT is pretty terrible right now...

Story

[FooGoo]

My wifes family moved to from Jamacia to the US when she was 3. a few years ago we went to Jamacia and she was upset to see how poor the country was compaired to the US. The fact is as with most Caribbean nations more Jamaicans live outside Jamaica than live there. This is due to a lack of oppurtunity at home. If the people in these nations have more access to OSS or any technology it's a very good thing. They have more oppurtunity for education and we get more skilled immigrants.

The US is an immigrant nation and for the past few years population growth in the US is being fueled by immigration because fewer US citizens are having kids. It only makes sense to outsource our our needs to countries with high migration rates to the US. South America and Asia. That way we increase our skilled population base.

People like to attribute this to evil globalism or money grubbing multinationals but it's simple. If we don't have generations of skilled workers in this country it will cease to exist.This is not a bad thing for the US.

IT is still viable if you don't suck

[lamontg]

Is IT still a viable field to get into and if so will it last?

Yes. But in the future it won't be enough to merely understand how computers work in order to make it in the IT field. You will need to understand how an IT department fits within the overall structure of an organization and how to meet the requirements of your internal customers. You will also need to understand how to scale your IT services within the organization. There are entirely too many bad system administrators out there who really need to get either educated or purged, and even the current IT downswing hasn't been able to do it. There are still too many people who are in the IT job market who should simply stop sending their resumes around. 1999 is over, and you weren't that good.

If you can't think beyond "this machine is broken, here's how to fix it" to "this process is broken, here's how to fix it" then don't bother going into IT. There are already way too many people who are perfectly technically capable in IT but who have no idea of how to solve, or in some cases even identify, a larger problem.

(And yes, I had a bad week at work)

Re:Re economics

[cmacb]

The OSS is repeating the tired old slogan that anything involving money is evil, but the truth of the matter is that money is what makes a higher standard of living possible."

I have never seen any Open Source document claim that money is evil. In fact, the notion that Open Source has something to do with Communism, Socialism, or any other form of economic theory is a leap of reason no less mystifying to me than Cantor's dealings with infinity (as discussed on your web page).

I happen to be a proponent of capitalism. The two deadliest things for capitalism are excessive government control of the flow of goods and services and excessive control of that flow by a few arbitrarily large businesses. having Standard oil control the flow of all oil in the United States was not good for capitalism, nor is it good to have one company corner the market on operating system and office automation software. That is particularly true (as the article points out) when that results in the creation of numerous closed standard formats for data.

The money that should be spent on computers is for R&D in new technologies, including software. That R&D on the software side is happening at (a few) universities here, within companies using Open Source, and to a large extent in Europe. For the most part Microsoft is milking a cash cow and trying to figure out how to keep it giving milk. Examples of research on NEW technologies which you could at one time find at research.Microsoft.com seem to have been abandoned for the most part.

AMD and the PowerPC give Intel enough competition to keep things healthy as far as hardware goes. Between the two monopolies, Intel and Microsoft I have a lot more respect for Intel, even though I wish competition were hotter sooner.

Finally, having one company dominate software, and another company dominate hardware is not in the long term best interest of this country. As the article accurately states, Open Source represents not only an opportunity for poorer countries to catch up technologically without the need for large sums of money, but it will also result in the education of substantial numbers of their population in the computer sciences. Today we turn people out of grad schools with computer science degrees who think that installing Windows and compiling a C program is the pinnacle of their university experience. We have dumbed-down our curriculums drastically thanks to Microsoft and Windows and we are going to get (actually it is happening now) the crap kicked out of us by countries that did not become so obsessed with a single operating system.

We will deserve it too. I just hope there are enough people here who will wake up so that we can get back in the race before WE become the third world nation of computing.