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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?"
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.
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)
Now the RIAA will start a campain against the OSS pirates in the Caribbeab.... oh, wait....
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.
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
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)
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 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.