Open Source Expertise in Short Supply

whydoyouask writes "Information week has an article on the shortage of expertise for enterprise open source projects and it's ramifications for both enterprises and salaries for those possessed of these skill. While it is suspicious in it's timing and references to Ballmer's recent email it does point out some definite considerations that companies planning open source projects better account for. Those looking for marketable job skills might also take note."

Comments

Blame?

[einhverfr]

This is EXACTLY the reason the company I work for refuses to switch to Linux. It isn't so much that we don't have smart administrators that need technical support from the vendor, it is that admins NEED someone external to blame when the shit does hit the fan.

Only if you go and install the latest stuff from Freshmeat. Most businesses use a supported commercial distribution (Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, etc.)

My business uses completely open source software because we have the technical personnel to make it work. When something breaks I am usually the one who fixes it, and if I can't I escalate to the community. We run our entire infrastructure on open source software and have extremely high returns on investment in these areas. We have found it to be very viable.

I used to work at Microsoft's Product Support Servicess. I can tell you that you are wrong if you feel the need to blame someone else. You can always blame someone else. I am not aware of any cases where Microsoft has been successfully sued for faults in their products, so maybe this is just a psychological need.....

Really, the reason for calling MS isn't to blame them, it is to escalate to them in order to get some additional perspective you can use to solve your problem (if you are intelligent) or to have someone babysit you through a process you are not willing to otherwise do (if you are not). Blame usually doesn't come into it at all, IMO.

Now, let me tell you about a time I needed technical support for an open source noncommercial product.

I had just locked down my box and Qmail started locking up on incoming connections. After about 10 incoming pop3 connections, the next one would hang until the service was restarted. The logs didn't show anything.

After doing my best to solve the problem (I was still somewhat new ot Qmail at the time), I sent an email to the list. Within about 15 minutes I got a reply asking me for more information. Within another 15 mintues, I got another email suggesting some diagnostics. It turned out the problem was that the log process would not handle an append-only logfile and so the log buffer would fill up and the process would lock. Unsetting the append-only attribute solved the problem. Total time to resolution after incident submitted: 30min. Total cost of support: $0. I could have paid for support, but I chose to have the community help me instead. Had it been more time critical (actually a system in production) I probably would have paid someone for their opinion.

PostgreSQL, Asterisk, and Samba also have extremely helpful communities, IME. If course not all OSS is this helpful. But the most common projects are.

My business (which supports much of this software) is at www.metatrontech.com

Re:I blame the GPL

[eclectechie]

I know you are trolling, but I'll bite anyway for the edification of others (as if anyone will see your post at -1).

So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use.

Wrong. You are only required to publish your source code if you distribute the resulting binary.

If you don't distribute the binary, you can keep your changes to yourself. Go re-read the GPL, particularly section 2: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt

Re:Matchmaker?

[mrchaotica]

I'm a lawyer and I'm not doing anything this evening. I'm sure some FOSS project could use one....But I don't know which or where.

Try emailing and asking the EFF, check the FSF's "Take Action" page and see if any of the listed organizations need your help, and perhaps see if you could help out Groklaw -- maybe PJ could endorse you on her site so that people needing your help would notice.

Or you could always start a "Free Software Lawyer Matching" site yourself -- just submit a Slashdot article about it and I'm sure you'll get lots of help.

More FUD from the same Retards.

[twitter]

I stopped reading when I ran into our old friend, SCO and M$ shill, Laura Didio quoted as an expert:

Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio agrees. "There's a dearth of skilled Linux administrators, by comparison to the more-mature Windows, Unix, NetWare, and Macintosh environments," she says. And what happens when too much demand meets too little supply? "They can command a premium," DiDio says. "They get a 20% to 30% salary premium in the large metropolitan markets."

Mature? Please. When you consider that one good Unix guru can do the work of five Winblows admins, the 30% "premium" for higher skills is worth it and that's why people pay it. But surprise, surprise, you won't cost yourself any more if you don't hire new people but let the ones you have do what they have been recommending for years.

This is the kind of stellar logic we can expect from the person who actually signed SCO's nasty NDA and came out blithering about what a strong case SCO had, when in fact SCO has nothing. Her shilling knows no bounds and we can expect her to faithfully echo whatever M$ is saying at anytime. Why do people ask her anything anymore?

Re:Matchmaker? -- Yes, they exist

[Paul Bain]

Are there any sites that match FOSS projects with potential volunteers?

[snip]

I'm a lawyer

SourceForge (SF) has been doing this for years. And SF lets its open source projects advertise for volunteers who want to work on non-technical matters (such as software documentation), too. So a project could advertise its need for a lawyer as well as, say, a PHP coder or DBA.

Re:Matchmaker?

[po8]

I screwed that post up badly. Sorry: hit Submit instead of Preview by mistake. Wish I could delete my own posts. Oh well, let's try again...

If you're serious about this, drop me a line at lawyer@po8.org. I can think of two projects I'm heavily involved with offhand that could use some pro bono legal help from somebody with the right credentials.

FUD vs. Reality

[smoon]

FUD: "Open source isn't supported well, or costs more to support"

Reality: "Open source tends to be supported extremely well, but the costs are incurred differently than with commercial software. More expensive is harder to evaluate since commercial stuff tends to be aquisition based + annual maintenance while open source tends to be a combination if in-house expertise, low aquisition cost, possibly higher annual maintenance. It could be a wash or either one could be higher. The difference is that _you_ are in control and can switch (or cancel) support contracts at will. Try that with some commercial product."

FUD: "Linux admins are hard to find"

Reality: "The Linux admins you do find tend to be 10x-100x better technically than the paper-MCSE idiots you'll get for windows admins. This translates to fewer admins needed overall, plus much less ''support'' required since the admins are more self-sufficient. You need to be able to hire people with 2-3 years of ''real'' experience vs. the 5-10 years demanded by most HR departments."

FUD: "Open source may force you to self-support with web searches & mailing lists"

Reality: "Most (99%+) windows problems I've encountered tend to be solved by google or microsoft knowledge base searches. The other 1% we either live with or assign a low-level tech to call and sit on hold waiting for a high-school dropout to read us a script about rebooting. The fact is, most commercial support sucks. Hard. Be glad there are mailing list archives, google searches, etc. to help solve problems. As a bonus, once you've solved the problem you're never forced to upgrade to a new unstable version by the vendor -- you support your own stuff with your own experience coupled with the experience of the community at large."

FUD: "Open source expertise is hard to find"

Reality: "There are a lot of open source projects in a lot of different fields. This is really like saying ''Computer experience is hard to find'' back in the 80s or 90s. The problem is finding experience for the specific product you need. Try finding a ''sagent'' admin to hire (an expensive proprietary ETL tool) -- it's hard because there aren't many people using it. Likewise finding someone with 10 years of Oracle or DB2 is going to be easier than 10 years of MySQL or Postgres, the point of which is that 1: the commercial product may have been around longer and 2: the commercial product from 10 years ago was likely a very different beast than the current product, so the value of 10 years of experience in a specific product is suspect at best. In this case you should be looking for 10 years of RDMBS/SQL experience without regard to the specific products used."

A lot of this seems to be a fundamental phase-shift in IT expertise required hitting the shoals of inadequate HR hiring practices.

Open Source cough expert cough for hire.

[oliverthered]

Hi, I'm an open source expert and currently looking for work. I finished my last contract a few months ago and have been using my savings to allow me to further improve open-source software.

I am currently:
Implementing bounty into bugzilla.
The ability to pay for bug fixes that are important to you, to incentives developers to fix them.

Converting a number of linux/gnu configuration files (all if possible) into xml with defining XSD's, using xmlstarlet to replace the various grep and Perl scripts currently used to read configuration.

Developing a system to read information from windows registry files and use that information to configure a linux/gnu system. The system will use registry to xml then xsl to transform that into an xml file compatible with the for mentioned linux/gnu configuration files.

A number of radical modifications to the way that the KDE user interface works.

Dynamically loading of content in view, instead of loading the entire content, improving latency and reducing memory and processor overhead, the user interface will update in constant time instead of linear time with constant memory and CPU usage, instead of linear memory and CPU usage.

Changing the way that menu are displayed.
The ability for applications to request a menu based on context. A menu will the be generated based upon this context, allowing for machine learning (moving items up and down the context hierarchy), and the ability for any function to be accessed from any menu.
Machine learning will allow the GUI to generate a menu tailored to the task in hand, statistics can be shared so that an organisation can look at how an application is being used, adjust there work processes and feed back the adjustments into the menuing system.

I am also working on other reviews of OSS software, identifying points that need looking at and suggesting possible solutions.

Apart from that I have helped write a ADSL modem driver , put forward a number of patches for the kernel,(usb and pcmcia network card), and reverse enginered the Microsoft access database fileformat.

So, if you've got an OSS problem and you think I can help provide the solution drop me an email at oliver_stieber@yahoo.co.uk.

Re:Note on the skilled admins thing

[1lus10n]

Most larger companies have helpdesks for helping users to keep the admins working on what they were hired for.

Re:Hard not to be cynical...

[gilesjuk]

Not to mention that Linux really refers to the core of the OS, the rest is GNU software that is in common use on Unix systems.

Many Unix solution providers won't have a hard time developing solutions for Linux. It has a lot more in common with Unix than Windows does.

Re:Hard not to be cynical...

[Neo-Rio-101]

Best advice to learning Japanese as with any language is to go to the country to live. You can do that in Japan if you start out teaching English with either an exchange program (best), or one of the dodgy English teaching companies.

Then what you do is study like crazy and get yourself a Japanese girl who wants to learn English. Then you do "language exchange" :D

Re:Advice for those looking to take a similar path

[Etyenne]

Do you have any advice or insight into your situation? For example, are you leveraging years of past experience and/or a large network of contacts?

Yes. I have been working 3 years for a Linux integrator that mostly service the SMB market; I also worked on a few "large" project (mostly, email servers). I would not say I have a large network of contact, but I have a good reputation in my circle. So far, all my lead where from contact made at my LUG, where I often do presentation at the monthly meeting. These presentations help build my credibility, and friends from the LUG contact me with offer when they heard I started freelancing.

I don't know how well this could apply to your situation, though. The LUG idea is a good one assuming that 1. you have one in your area, and 2. at least some professionnal frequent it.

I think the idea is to make yourself visible, and demonstrate technical proficiency. Other avenue might be to participate in local technical mailing list and forum, and offer sound advice. Or frequent your local board of trade to network with local businessman (although you will need to adapt your discourse for these people).

Sorry I do not have anything more concrete, I must admit I have been very lucky so far to be in the right place at the right time. Could you expand a little on your professionnal background ?