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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?"
The commercial, and particularly the retail, software industry is in big trouble from open source software. As software becomes a commodity, producing it will become less and less valuable to employers. Oddly, it still costs lots of money to create professional, polished consumer software, but the usually weak open source imitations are "good enough" for most people, or will be fairly soon. The real question is what happens when companies stop doing the basic research and innovation that open source developers rely on for ideas to copy?
I agree, but programming would only be worth doing in the long run if you actually enjoyed doing it. After society's fascination with day-to-day software like Office wears off as the century progresses, programming may simply be viewed as nothing more than a service field to keep essential computers running, for computers would be inevitably integrated into all facets of life.
In fact, I think a lot of this is already happening.
www.firastudios.com
www.firastudios.com
IANAEconomist, but I doubt that any of the US economy is going to last.
Forget long-term sustainablity issues, and just notice the increasing flood of companies moving manufacturing offshore to cut their costs. Certainly a smart move if all else were equal, but as more and more companies do it there's going to be less and less money to go around for the American worker, and as the total worker income drops the total consumer spending will drop as well.
And consumer spending amounts to almost 2/3 of the US economy. Expect a viscious cycle until the US economy stabilizes on a new equilibrium, with few US citizens able to participate in our traditional profligate lifestyle.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
My family is from T&T (although I was born in Canada) so let me clarify a few things:
It's more than 2 islands. There are a lot of little islands too but the 2 main ones are Trinidad and Tobago. They used to be separate countries but were amalgamated by the British (who valued them for the cane fields) for administrative simplicity.
T&T has 2 major exports, not one: Oil and drugs. Seriously. The US suppliers take their yhats down from Florida and sail into Tobago beaches. This is where they load up on that which was produced in South America, particularly Colombia. The other main industry is tourism which is obviously not a cash export.
But the author is right about oil being critical to the economy. The main reason my family is well off is that my father's father worked for the oil companies for 35 years earning far above average wages. Keep in mind that T&T is a 3rd world country and you see poverty over there like you never see in north america, not even in the First Nations' areas of Canada.
" Too often, when we hear the phrase, "developing country," it's used as a euphemism for, "poverty-stricken nation whose most obvious features are poorly-maintained roads, tin-roofed shacks, bad plumbing, and unreliable electricity.""
There is a lot of poverty. There are a whole lot of VERY VERY wealthy people as well. I expect that the relative number of wealthy and poor people to middle class folks is higher than in the USA.
The highways and roads in cities are well maintained. If you get out into rural areas in the jungle and such, it is to be expected that you will dodge potholes that your car could fall into. And when driving on mountain roads, you've gotta watch out for sections that have fallen into the sea.
As to housing, there is a lot of nice housing, and there are a lot of poor shacks as well.
The electricity is more reliable than you'd think. But the level of people connecting things illegally to the power lines is high. This makes being a power linesman quite dangerous because you can get killed when the power is officially shut down and someone's illegally and improperly connected device fries you.
Having recently been made redundant, I'm not sure that programming is a viable career option. One of the reasons for the redundancy was that the company is outsourcing development to India. OK, so the major reason was that we were the subject of a "merger" (takeover) and they wanted our customerbase.
BTW "we" were the result of another merger which had occurred 18 months earlier.
I see the combined company eventually employing only business analysts, project co-ordinators, salesmen and client liason people. There will probably be a few network and infrastructure guys but eventually, given that all PCs and laptops had a "standard" build, were updatable from a central network point etc, this could be outsourced too. That leaves support functions, like admin and purchasing. Be creative enough and that could be outsourced too!
Regarding software dev in the carribean - why not? In a country like Trinidad and Tobago, the dollar, Euro and Pound exchange rates are so favourable to "investors" that setting up a software shop really shouldn't be a problem. Trinis are generally well educated, they speak English as a first language (OK, so it may not be Queens English, but it's still English - mon!) they work hard. Matter of fact, I was thinking of doing the same thing, but in Barbados where most of the kids are highly educated and most of them are bored because there are no jobs. Those that don't drift into drugs are getting out to Canada, the States or the UK.
I know this first hand, I have family all over...
Selling trinkets to cruise ships. If I had to sell trinkets to cruise ship passengers to feed my family I would. It has nothing to do with the price of an office suite. It means that there is no need for office suites. There is no oppurtunity to use one whether it is free or not.
These trinkets are usually hand made by familys to be sold. It's a family business designed to fit their markets and has to do with the "bandwitdth" of their ecomony and
not the price of an office suite.
The US economy has a ton a bandwidth to support many industries. Just because they don't doesn't mean it's bad for them.
Begin Rant
I'd much rather sell a "trinket" than stand on the corner begging for cash for food.
It's not like OSS doesn't have a need for trinkets. Look at ThinkGeek.com selling trinkets to geeks. Ooooh look at the shiny light on my new Mach 3 combination LED flashlight, key chain, bottle opener, tire repair kit. Or my desktop refrigerator that holds a 6 pack of Geek Drink of Choice, or caffinated soap. What the fuck is caffinated soap for? Maybe it's for removing the blue thinking goo from my ass when I sat on it in my new ergonomic Quake Battle Chair.
Maybe our economy has too much bandwidth.
End Rant
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Since, you brought it up. When I said the politics are a bitch I meant it. When I took that promotion I laid off several members of the team I took over. Why? They where under performing. I replace them with qualified people from my old department who would have been laid-off themselves. As Dir of security I oversaw the lay-offs of 400 people within the company. Only 3 where my decision. I fought to keep the people that where loyal to me and did their jobs well. Thats all any manager can do. I put my ass on the line for my team and it cost me. I made political enemies and later I was laid-off. Would I do it again? Yes. I had a team of great techies working for me they where loyal to me and I was loyal to them. Thats what I want in a manager because I didn't have it when I was starting out.
Is management tough? Yes, you have to make tough choices not just should we use Linux or Solaris but who is going to get a paycheck next week or should we lay off so and so because his wife just died of cancer last month.
I know it's frowned upon but I love being a tech manager. I get to work with great people on interesting projects that may someday change the way people think. It's already happend once in my lifetime. I get to see tech evolve like most people don't because I am not focused on one specifc area. I can understand coders who are writing the platform and talk to the ops guys who are build the systems. I get to see the big picture and where it's going.
It's great. But there are still 400 people I walked out the door. I just tried to make it as painless as possible under the circustances. I could lead my team but not the company. I didn't think a company could spend 300 mil in 4 years and have nothing to show for it. Shows you how good I am at understanding management.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
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.
How much more customizeable can you get than having the source code? What I mean is, if you have the source, you can do *anything* concievable with it. Not just the things that Microsoft predicted you might want to change (even if that does happen to be 99% of it).
Say, what's the fastest way to rename 1,000 files according to some regular expression on your Windows box?
when you are going to be forced to upgrade at some particular time that you have no control over?
.csv in both Excel and Open Office? I don't know if my version of Excel has some kind of bug, but its output was too messed up to deal with).
How can a company afford to pay programmers to customize after paying monopolistic prices to get basic functionality?
What if some of the tools I want to use are not part of the MS collective, how will I get the MS parts to talk to the non-MS parts (I have actually taken an Excel file, dumped it into
And, yes, I have modified APPLICATION (let's compare apples to apples, here) source code in order to get the kind of output I wanted (and it would have been a real bitch if I couldn't have).
No, it is not impossible to customize MS software, it just is not as economical.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!