[Year 12 IPM] Open Source Skills in Demand

[Donna Benjamin]

http://www.theage.com.au/news/chatroom/scruffy-geeks-on-the-outer/2005/10/10/1128796456004.html

Open source boom

A little factoid that many may not be aware of is that despite our
massive IT balance of trade deficit, this country is the place to be
when it comes to open source development. Believe it or not, Australia
has more open source developers per head of capita than anywhere else.
Open source development projects with esoteric sounding names such as
Samba, Mambo, Squid, Lams and Moodle, plus better-known projects such as
Apache, OpenOffice.org, Gnome, KDE, and MySQL, have Australian
developers in prominent roles.

According to Pia Waugh, the vice-president of open source developers'
body Linux Australia, the vibrancy of the local scene is such that we're
gaining a reputation for being an open source offshore outsourcing
destination. But the problem is, with local companies and, lately,
government agencies, looking to implement open source solutions, the
pool of human resources to do the grunt work is drying up.

"I know of IT companies that have been looking for people with open
source skills for three months," says Ms Waugh, who is also a key
adviser for the conference program of the LinuxWorld expo in Sydney next
year. "It's not so much a shortage of developers but a shortage of
implementers and support people. The three main certifications that are
in demand are Red Hat, Novell and LPI, which is vendor neutral.

"This kind of demand represents a massive opportunity for graduates and
for universities to run the courses."


-- 
donna benjamin - executive director
http://www.creativecontingencies.com/
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research - facilitation - web development