THIRST FOR FOSS
Ishwarya nagarajan
companies using technology.and the recent recession has helped to
change the general perception about FOSS.The result is a heavy demand
for FOSS experts from independent software vendors,SME's,the
government,and technology-oriented companies in the embedded
device,mobile and netbook markets.elaborating on the demand for foss
experts across INDIA have quoted
"during the last one year i have seen tremendous growth in the
number of people/companies coming for foss training.we have enrolled
many who've been given a deadline of one month to get themselves
trained on the linux server because the company cannot afford to buy a
WINDOWS/SOLARIS box.
ADVANTAGE FOSS
Jaijit bhattacharya,country director says:"Organisations are getting
smarter by the day and will not spend unnecessarily on proprietary
software when better qualityFOSS is available and readily downloadable
from the internet.FOSS professionals will be ones enabling
organisations benefit from the cost savings provided".
Adding to this rajesh chhikara,director of the institute of open
source,and head of HR EarlySail Software says"it's very simple-if you
ned to be different from the crowd then you have to learn technology
that you have not learnt in college and the best way is to opt for
open source technologies.it guarantees a leap ahead of the crowd".
Further expertise in foss is bound to help you score over your
proprietary software counterparts."the thinking horizon of a foss
expert is wider than that of a proprietary software expert.foss expert
deal with a lot of logical and environment compatibility changes that
makes them naturally more dynamic"
"the confidence to tweak and tune with the open source product gives
foss experts a competitive edge over proprietary software experts as
they can customise software as per one's need and at a cheaper cost"
says shankar iyer director services,Red hat.
THE SKILLS IN DEMAND
A FOSS professional can basically follow one of the following two
paths-development or administration."professionals with expertise in
security dataware housing.Mysql DBA and FOSS based infrastructure
management software;certified FOSS professionals,zend Framework/
Symfony Framework engineers,and Drupal developers are the kind of FOSS
professionalsin demand"says minochaThus,LAMP(linux,apache, Mysql and
php),LARM(Linux,apache,ruby on rails and mysql),java,system
administrator courses like RHCE,SUSE;Asterisk for VOIP services and
JBOSS for application server are the beneficial skillsets to acquire.