The Need for Open Source Skills

The Need For Open Source Skills

By Roberto Galoppini
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-09-12

Bernard Golden, Navica CEO and known open source expert, in his recent report "Open Source in the Enterprise" dedicates a section to open source skills, returning interesting evidence of actual use of open source within enterprises.

In the last Open Source Census Newsletter, Bernard Golden says (bold emphasis is mine):

We did this to harvest evidence of actual use of open source within enterprises, reasoning that they would not hire for skills absent real use of the products named in the job postings. While not perfect evidence of actual use, we calculated that open source jobs account for approximately 10% of all IT jobs: certainly a reflection of significant open source use within enterprises.

The open source jobs boom reflect enterprises' needs, but also public tenders tell a lot about open source usage within enterprises and public institutions. Beyond the possible impact of the Dutch study on the acquisition of open source software, the importance of open source skills has been already recognized years ago. After four years, nothing changed, and open source skill development business is still coming from a small in number of companies (LPI, Red Hat, MySQL and few others).

Banca d'Italia - the bank of Italy - recently published a public tender requiring some certified open source skills, basically related to above mentioned strong brands. What matter most here is to highlight the abudance of open source packages they plan to use, ranging from OpenLDAP, Nagios, Cacti, rsyslog, Puppet and Trac.

Open source self-sufficiency is here? May be Gartner is right...

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About the Author:
In 2001 started up a small firm specialized in infrastructural solutions based on Open Source software. In 2004 launched the first Italian consortium of Open Source SMEs, becoming its president. Collaborates to academy research on Open Source organizational models and on Open Source meta-districts, keeps rubrics and writes articles on ICT magazines.

http://robertogaloppini.net