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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?"
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.
Operating systems should be free and open. Software should not. This is honest dissent, not a troll so moderators need to find someone else to mod down.
;)
Having Windows controlled by Microsoft instead of the public allows them to wrestle companies to their knees. On the other side, the open source movement has as many innovative ideas as Microsoft which is damn near zero. By creating free software, the open source movement kicks third party companies in the kidneys while Microsoft is efficiently pushing them down already.
If Microsoft opened the source to Windows (perhaps 98) tomorrow, Linux would die a quick death or revert back to being a tool of hobbyists.
In fact, that might be the ultimate weapon in any potential trade war with Europe.
Laws are for people with no friends.
This sounds like an MS baiter to me.....open source solutions are as good as the users want them to be....if you don't like something, fix it yourself or pay an opensource programmer to fix it for you.....the real question boils down to "how much is that bug really bugging you?"...Even MS products are released with an "acceptable number of bugs"....let's not get hung up on perfection when simply getting the job done is more important.
Here's my take on the "Software Ecosystem" as Bill likes to call it......people will forever onward need to get custom stuff done on computers...it's a fact. Not every project can be mass produced for the world and sold to billions of people for INSANE profit levels. I believe that most computer work is custom stuff, a little glue here, adapter there, specialized GUI for operators....this is where most of the rubber meets the road...it will always be there.
OSS equalizes the playing field for people/companies that want to realize all of the profits themselves. No MS tax, no tax to others, simply your brain and as much as you can produce. OSS is also good for business because they own the software that they've paid to be created...no extra tax in the future for them either, no update charge, no extra fees to keep current on MS Exchange Server, Backoffice server or whatnot....they write spec's for something, it's produced, they pay once and own the source...if they need maintaince, it's easily purchased from a competitive field of qualified professionals.....it's good business.
I've got no problem with people "buying" a solution either, that's part of the capitalist system. Define what you are good at, find a market niche and purchase the rest from people that are good at their respective areas.
It's the tax created by MS's "network effect" that has lots of people chafing...the idea that somehow I MUST send a good percentage of my profits elsewhere....it's MS's "Toll Booth" philosophy that's gonna cause them trouble....people don't like paying tolls, and they usualy find ways to either "slug" the meters or sneak around....In this case, they build their own seperate "Information superhighway"....OSS
OSS simply levels the playing field for programmers and buyers....we've all (people who use OSS) come to the conclusion that sharing a free OS, even with it's bugs (open to interpretation, I have not found any) is better than paying the increasingly draconian "Windows Tax" EVERY time you turn around. Pay for this, pay for that, pay to get inspected, pay when the inspectors kick in your door, coming to check your licenses. MS has turned their OS into a shakedown at every level.
Most disingenous was Bill G's comment about OSS keeping countries poor and being fine if you want your country to stay backward and agricultural....bullsh*%....it gives them a "leg up" on the competition, not a deficit. This put's the competition strictly on brain power rather than lawyer power.
Time's gonna come when everyone is gonna have to pick which side of the revolution they want to be on....I've already done that because I see that MS can't win this fight...there's no company to buy, there's nobody to really sue (yeah, SCO fud, but they are going home in a wheelbarrow)...This can't be stopped primarily because it's really good for business and programmers alike.....it's only bad for the "Toll-booth operators" like MS.....
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?