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Evangelizing OSS in the Caribbean

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dollar-stretching dept.

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?"

2 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Evangelizing OSS in the Carribean by kurosawdust · · Score: 5, Funny

    I've got the perfect theme song: "No Windows, No Cry"

  2. Re:Re economics by cmacb · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.