[Novalug] Off-topic -- Job market -- Current state of -- Was "SSN use"

[Bryan J Smith]

On Fri, 2009-10-02 at 03:18 -0400, jerry w wrote:
> but I had the impression that the new dem administration was
> more open source friendly,

The administration has made no difference.  They never do.

Open Source adoption is the same it has been since Clinton,
through W. and now on to Obama.  FLOSS adoption is out of
need, as well as the fact that there are departments in the
US Federal Government that, flat out, do _not_ trust Microsoft
and most other vendor.

Speaking 100% first-hand here.

> and we were doing well market share wise with linux vs m$,

It's never been Linux v. Microsoft.  It's been Community-developed
and Lock-in avoiding versus vendor-centric and lock-in happy.

E.g., the US military is still anti-Microsoft ever since they were
duped into believing NT has a POSIX subsystem or other standard.
That is one of the best and heavily quoted complaints.

The US Federal Government, at least most departments, are honestly
sick of sole-vendor solutions.  Again, first-hand experience, they
will only go with vendors that ...

1)  They can leave if they want to, and
2)  Can be their first, unbiased reference when they have problems

So it's not merely just FLOSS, but a FLOSS vendor that has no lock-in
and, better yet, solves problems with other vendors' issues.

The numerous years I worked on Wall Street, the #1 reason they preferred
Linux over Solaris and Windows was because the professionals had no
vendor-alignments and even companies like Red Hat would solve solutions
in HP, IBM, Sun, Veritas and VMware products before the latters did. 

> and that M$ jobs were just use our product, then get the execs
> to pay our extortionist M$ costs per license, per seat in a company
> for all our tech, and you get a M$/Gates level salary (can that bec
> considered a kickback? and prosecuted?),

Actually, the average Linux professional makes more and there are less
required for support of X systems.  This has been shown over and over
in salary surveys from everyone from CMP Media to the IEEE.

It's more of the fact that ...
A)  People justifying their jobs, especially the "extra numbers"
B)  Those people don't want to learn new things

Remember, the Microsoft Solutions Provider aspect is _very_profitable_.
You have a _guaranteed_ 2-year upgrade cycle for new sales with older
products no longer being compatible.

That's wholly different than, say, Red Hat and Novell which not only
maintain their Enterprise releases 7+ years with full ABI/API
compatibility, not only offer built-in virtualization (that actually
works) so you can run the old releases on newer releases+hardware, but
maintain long-term application and interface compatibility back those 7+
years.

First-hand experience again, the problem with an old client that
disregarded GNOME+Firefox over 5 years earlier, only to revisit it
because of the costs of PCs with Windows had a two-fold issue.

1)  The number of people still developing for MS IE 6 that feared for
their jobs, and

2)  Those same people that didn't want to learn developing for the Gecko
engine (Firefox, like Mozilla before it), which was no different than
them not wanting to learn the newer MS IE 7 and 8 code, tools, templates

Ironically if those people would have learned Gecko (Mozilla) over 5
years ago, they would still be "current" today with Firefox.  I even
proved that GNOME profiles were easier to manage than Explorer ones.

I honestly cannot believe how many people out there have never messed
with Netscape/iPlanet Directory Server for managing Mozilla-Firefox
profiles.  That common argument for ActiveDirectory is absolutely built
on ignorance, not reality.  It's the first FUD I totally blast at a
client.

Once you add in GNOME 2 and show them how accessibility works (so good
that it won the Hellen Keller award many years ago), which removes the
common ActiveDirectory-Windows argument/non-sense, show it how it works
in a reduced resource + major lock-down (where you _can_ lock it down
with profiles _better_ than Windows), and people are like, "oh, I didn't
know that."

One consultant doing the job in two (2) days with GNOME+Firefox that
took an entire Windows team months to do.  ;)

>  or are all the MOUS certified glorified secretaries that
> M$ Potential grants disabled (and others) people a marketing
> lie?

I've been regularly "converting" DOCX, XLSX, PPDX files from
various employees to other employees of the same clients because
some are running Office 12 (2007) while others are running anything
from Office 9 (2000) to Office 11 (2003).  A great way to sell
people on OpenOffice.org 3 and StarOffice 9 (if they want a
commercial product in the latter option).

And I regularly remind companies that they can install _both_
MS Office and OpenOffice.org/StarOffice and don't have to choose
one or the other.  In the case of OpenOffice.org, it's free.  In
the case where they absolutely need a commercial option, StarOffice
is pennies (literally $15-25/unit) in quantity.



-- 
Bryan J  Smith         Professional, Technical Annoyance 
Linked Profile:       http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith 
-------------------------------------------------------- 
Only engineers can solve the growing needs of consumers
Stop being "aware" (that's so '70s) and start supporting
real solutions that actually work and sustain the planet