Why FOSS Education?
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Component integration is the name of the game
The
growing adoption of Open Source and Free Software components by small,
medium and large size organisations has created a large gap in
understanding by the people within those organisations of how to
implement and make most effective use of the new software technologies.
Software
development is becoming less important and is slowly being replaced by
a process of choosing software components that needs integrating and
maintaining. Choosing and implementing the most optimum components
requires different skills and understanding of the new Open Source /
Free Software market place.
Skills gap
There is
currently a large skills gap being created that hinders this transition
to the new software market place. From now on and in the future,
appropriate levels of ongoing education targeted to the proper audience
will be required to empower the people within the organisation.
Impending changes
The following catalysts will create in the near future a new wave of acceptance and implementation of OS/FS in the industry:
- Accceptance if Microsoft's latest release: Windows Vista
Problems with digtal rights managemet, the lack of obvious advantages for commercial users purchasing Vista to upgrade or replace r XP. Confusing licensing schemes, for all it's corporate and personal Vista editions (see PC-Pro magazine p. 176, Real World Computing by Jon Honeyball) don't help. - Microsoft's ongoing problems resolving security issues
Windows XP is considered to be the main culprit in virus, worm and spam propagation through the Internet) - Emergence of sophisticated hardware platforms combined with virtual machine architectures
Allows the industry to move towards a more service based architecture: hardware resources can be freely allocated and re-deployed irrelevant of operating environment and services that need to be supported - Emergence of industrial strength OS/FS support structures
Generic operating environment support provided by major computer manufacturers and large distributions of OS/FS (such as IBM, HP, Sun, Oracle, Red Hat and Novell)
New services dedicated to supporting the core systems and application stacks, for example: database – Webserver – development environment or database – application server – bespoke application (SpikeSource)
Organisations preparing to include Open Source components within their infrastructure soon discover the complex minefield of component dependencies, and relationships. To be able to take advantage of the richness, quality and adaptability of Open Source products people within the organisations need ongoingly to develop new skills to be able to integrate these new emerging technologies within their existing skill sets.
