Submitted by Norm Roulet on Mon, 11/08/2004 - 23:44.
Crain's Cleveland reported today that Open Source programmers are in high demand, which means NEO universities and businesses should train and certify our residents for this opportune sector of the IT industry. The benefits go beyond skilling our folks for the new economy, as this will insure businesses in the area are able to find the workers they need to locate and grow here.
Of course, REALNEO is entirely open source - we run Drupal on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) plaform, and will soon integrate in People Aggregator (FOAF), OpenMedia, and several other projects, so folks using the site are experiencing the state of art of open source, and local programmers are encouraged to become involved in any of the framework project - post your interest as a comment below.
Regarding the big world of open source enterprise application development in NEO, read on...
Crain's Cleveland On-Line Editor Jeff Stacklin references a Nov.
8, 2004 article in Information Week:
Certification:
Is It Right For An Open-Source World? -->Nov.
8, 2004
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<>We want the expertise in open source
to be internal to the company,' says Dutile. That's why KeyCorp covers
certification costs for employees via Red Hat or the Linux Professional
Institute.
Which
links to another related and insightful Information Week article on
this challenge:
In
Search Of Open-Source Experts
As companies ramp up open-source
deployments, expertise is in high demand and short supply. The costs of
developing talent can add up.
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High demand?
Is there a link to the article? I'd be interested in knowing just exactly how many and who's going to be hiring the open source programmer jobs. Not to mention that the certifications the Info Week article is talking about are networking certs, not programming certs...
Talking code
 The blurb from Crain's Cleveland Editor's Choice is pasted below and found posted on their site here. I don't know if anyone has assessed the demand for open source programmers here - perhaps NEOSA has more data. I have heard from a few folks in town they have had trouble finding PHP coders, ultimiately using someone working after hours from his day job. It is certainly worth gaining more formal understanding of this current and future situation... anyone have any further data or perspective?
Talking code
For those techies in the crowd, InformationWeek has this discussion on the merits of getting certified in open-source languages.
I
won’t pretend to know the merits of open-source vs. everything else.
However, the debate over open source certification has been an
interesting one in many IT departments.
At the center of the
debate is KeyCorp, which, according to the article, “is retraining many
of its 1,400 IT employees on Linux, covers the cost for IT employees
seeking certification either through the Linux Professional Institute
or Red Hat. Certification can cost as much as $3,500 for a Red Hat
Certified Engineer and as much as $2,500 for a Red Hat Certified
Technician, for employees with some experience working with Unix, says
Bob Dutile, executive VP of Key Technology Services, the technology
division of KeyCorp.
"We want the expertise in open source to be internal to the company," Mr. Dutile says.Â
UMass justification for LAMP Programming Suite education
I'm doing some research on this issue - a web search found the following course posting at UMass - I contacted the program director to see if he has background data - will look for more related insight.
LAMP Programming Suite
The popularity of “Open System Software� has
increased the demand for LAMP Suite programmers to develop,
support, and maintain web applications along with associated
System Administrator tasks. UMass Boston is offering Linux
courses this fall and plans to offer follow-on intensive training
programs in Apache Web Administration, MySQL, and Perl/PHP
in the spring and summer of 2005.