Reluctance to invest in our people.
The article of Graeme Philipson that I referred to in the previous post has some ring of truth but there is also some tension with it in my view of the world.
Two years ago, and three years after the Graeme Philipson article, I recorded an article that stated the there was a huge ICT trade deficit except for Open Source which was producing an export income.
There is not doubt in my mind, from personal experience, that there is a HUGE skills deficit in this FOSS area, so much so that South Australians, on the whole, may well have the idea that there is no choice but for proprietary software. By and large schools perpetuate this view by the mere fact that proprietary software is generally the only software on the computers in their classrooms. The perpetuate it in other ways as well.
So why would we perpetuate something which is contributing to our trade deficit rather than invest in something that is earning us exports? Graeme possibly hit on an answer -
Two years ago, and three years after the Graeme Philipson article, I recorded an article that stated the there was a huge ICT trade deficit except for Open Source which was producing an export income.
There is not doubt in my mind, from personal experience, that there is a HUGE skills deficit in this FOSS area, so much so that South Australians, on the whole, may well have the idea that there is no choice but for proprietary software. By and large schools perpetuate this view by the mere fact that proprietary software is generally the only software on the computers in their classrooms. The perpetuate it in other ways as well.
So why would we perpetuate something which is contributing to our trade deficit rather than invest in something that is earning us exports? Graeme possibly hit on an answer -
They do not wish to train people, even graduates, because this costs money.What sort of legacy are we leaving for our children?Surely we are not that short sighted?
Labels: FOSS, ICT_Skills
posted by Wara @ 8:16 pm
1 Comments:
At 4:00 am,
Bill Kerr said…
Just came across this blog by Ramon Leon, My Journey to Linux
It's an interesting story about how he gradually made the transition from one culture to another
I've been mucking around with computers for maybe 20 years but have only recently discovered late binding, that you can alter variables while the program is running. That's enormously important for learning but hardly anyone knows about it.
Check out the video link from this other post by Leon, Smalltalk in Action which shows "some of the features of the refactoring browser on a running instance of the classic Asteroids game".
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