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Ask Slashdot: Where Are the Open Source Jobs?
stry_cat writes "My company has bought into the FUD and is going 100% Microsoft. Rather than work in this environment and be continuously at odds with upper management, I have decided to seek employment elsewhere. Where do I look for an open source job? I've started with the local paper's Sunday classifieds. I've looked on dice.com and monster.com. However almost all are Microsoft related. The few that aren't are some sort of dinky contract or temp job. So is there a place to find a job in an open source environment?"
I'm afraid this question is unanswerable as we don't know what type of job you:
a. Like to do
b. Have already done
c. Are good at
Please be more specific in future requests for assistance.
Bad joke in the subject, but it's true. I've found that submitting patches to a established open source project is the easiest way to find a job, in fact without moving a finger.
Starting a decent open source program is even better. My pet project ccextractor is a very niche things yet I get offers for customizations / deployment / etc very often (to me often here is something like twice a month).
The Mozilla Foundation is hiring. They even have a billboard on 101 near San Francisco: "Work for mankind, not for the man".
Most of the hosting, "cloud", data mining, and data warehousing industry is Linux based. The infrastructures of the big players like Google and Facebook are all Linux. Once you get off the desktop, Microsoft isn't dominant.
I have issues of those Open Source Zealots who accuse everyone who made a conscious decision to drop Open Source and go with Widows as believing the FUD. The way a product is licensed has little if anything to do with its product quality. Linux is a great OS. But it isn't perfect Windows is better then Linux in a lot of Areas... Also Linux is better then Windows in a lot of areas.
Why Windows?
1. Office comparability... Oddly enough when you are working with other businesses they prefer to get Office Compatible documents. LibreOffice does a great job at office compatibility however it is 99% compatible, so 3 times a year you have an issue and you need to look like your company is to cheap to buy software that the rest of the industry uses.
2. Human Resources... You can find a lot of people who are Skilled in Windows and Open Source Tools, You can find people skilled in Windows only, and you can find people skilled in Open Source Only... However there are a lot more windows skilled people so if they are hiring they want to get a wider market to choose from.
3. Third Party Software... Often Business will buy those expensive enterprise systems that every employee hates. However they do do their job and make the business runs more effetiently. They have been tested to work in Windows and there are not to many Open Source tools that do that. The debate of if these Enterprise Systems are more valuable then if you get a custom program is an other debate.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
There's tons and tons of open-source jobs out there. One of the keywords here is "Android". The other keyword is "embedded". Linux and Android are being used for all kinds of embedded devices now, and there's tons of jobs for people using C and C++ (C more at the low levels, kernel, device drivers etc., C++ at the higher levels for applications). People who can work with and build embedded Linux systems are in high demand, and there's good demand for Qt C++ programmers too as that's being used a lot on these embedded devices that have touchscreens.
Now, this doesn't necessary mean you'll be doing a lot of contributions upstream to the open-source community, but you will be working with a lot of OSS components, and developing proprietary software that interacts with them. And you definitely won't be doing any work with MS technologies, as those have no place in an embedded system (there are some places using WinCE, but they're dying out and many are switching to Linux or Android).