Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I've got the perfect theme song: "No Windows, No Cry"
pasty-faced nerds roaming the streets of Kingston. I give 'em 5 minutes before they're robbed and hacked up with machetes.
If they can't afford office they sure as heck can't afford joint developent of free code with U.S. programmers.
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?
Jah, mon! We got the bobsled team feelin' irie after jammin' on tuxracer a few times.
Besides, mon, lemme tell you -- after they said that Linux had superior rastability, we were sold.
"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds." (Redemption Song)
The fact that Free Software is gaining in popularity is a Good Thing (tm). Yes, it will lead to lower wages and perhaps fewer jobs, but society as a whole will benefit.
Now the RIAA will start a campain against the OSS pirates in the Caribbeab.... oh, wait....
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
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.
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
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.
Hopefully the OSS revolution will help rid the world of the indignity caused by cruise ships filled with passengers buying trinkets.
As for the question of IT jobs. The software developing jobs will gradually fade into memory, but there is still a need for having IT skills, and there will continue to be jobs for network admins, data entry and report writers, etc.
The main goal of OSS is simply to end the idea of software development as a business. Software development is only one piece of the pie.
But back to third world evangelizing. Most US software companies have found out that they cannot afford serious OSS development. When the flaws of the revolution become apparent, it is natural to move to the third world.
The question is whether or not the natives have caught on to the double edge sword. Preaching free software and creating a world where software is only taken and not traded, then the third world nimrods who fall for the propaganda will find their software development skills worth less than the local trinket makers.
In someways I see this little Stalin-wannabe iconoclast preaching in the third world as the ultimate act of contempt. Giving your work away for free doesn't work in the first world. So you preach to the peasantry of the glories of the revolution to the third world.
It is a fun example of history repeating itself. The fearless leader preaches the glories of revolution to the peasantry knowing full well that the dictatorship of the prolitariat intends to pave the roads of their paradise with the blood of their followers.
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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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?
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Basic programming jobs will leave the US. As applications get more complex there is less incentive to hire local programmers to do basic code work. I can hire foreigners to do the grunt work or use OSS toolkits/libraries to save money. I can then put that money into my core business which is marketing. Everyone that works at a software hous knows that marketing runs the show.
... In 2003 I took a promotion from Dir of Corp. Security to Dir of Production Operations and was laid off several months later after increasing uptime and everything else. Did I know that I would probably loose my job by taking the promotion? Yup! As a start-up on the decline I realised my director of sec. position was irrelevant so I angled for the Dir of Ops job which was very relevant to the company. I got the job and made improvements which benefited the company and I probably expended my employemt by over a year. Because I took the initiative to provide a service that my company needed I made out pretty well in the severance area.
Th US has always exported jobs. I started in IT in 1989 as an IT Manager and have avoided the development and engineering jobs like the plauge because they where being outsourced. In 1994 I changed my focus from IT Managment to security because better network management tools had arrived an made it easier to outsource IT Management. Through the 90s I watched my IT friends getting laid off as the companies they worked for outsource management to IBM, Exodus, C&W,
It's up to me to make my self relevant to US employers and I have found that the easiest way is through being in management (though the politics are a bitch). You can't make an impact or change the world if you are locked in cube coding our trapped behind 15 miles of cable in a server room.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
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
...Guybrush Threepwood.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
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...
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
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.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
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)
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
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!