DIGITAL LIFE * APRIL 1, 2008 * THE STRAITS TIMES
Open‑source talent: Dearth or ‑plenty?
One firm moves to Windows while another stays its open‑source course, IRENE THAM reports
WHILE more users are going down the open‑source path, one Singapore firm will be ending its nine‑year journey on that route. Its grouse ‑ a lack of open‑source talent here.
The company is Virtual Map, which provides road maps through its streetdirectory.com website. It also develops and hosts Web‑based map applications for corporate clients.
Since its founding in 1999, the firm has been hosting its map applications on open‑source operating system, MandrakeSoft, renamed Mandriva three years ago.
All was well until last year, when its IT administrator left. "We couldn't replace him," said Eugene Lim, director of business development at Virtual Map.
The firm ended up hiring someone well‑versed in another Linux operating system called Fedora Core.
Eugene said because skills are "not portable” between the different open‑source flavours, his company had to move its map applications to the new operating system.
"We spent three weeks doing that all because of one guy."
The firm's frustrations did not end there. Recent , it found itself repeating the three‑week exercise, moving applications from Fedora Core to yet another Linux distribution, as "the open-source community has decided to end support for Fedora”.
What this means is that the community will no longer develop security patches and feature improvements on the Fedora operating system.
In October last year, the firm turned to mainstream software vendor Microsoft for help.
"It would be great if we could have only one server operating system running all the time and one neck to choke if things don't work," said Eugene.
Although I'm not a system administrator, I've done some administrative tasks before on different Linux distros. So I do find the following comment quite strange.
Eugene said because skills are "not portable” between the different open‑source flavours, his company had to move its map applications to the new operating system.
I think stuff like quota management, user/file permissions, network configuration, email/web server configuration, setting up cron jobs, etc are pretty portable skills. Even though certain specifics might differ, it's very likely you can take your set of skills (and looking up some man pages) on one distro and work comfortably on another distro if you're working on the same tasks. Only potential problem is package management but it's nothing so major that Google can't handle.
Another comment that appears to be problematic is this.
... as "the open-source community has decided to end support for Fedora”.
Erm...I checked the wiki on Fedora Core and guess what the actual scenario is? Fedora Core 6 has reached its end of life, but 7, 8 are still supported.
A reminder to users: Fedora Core 6 will reach its end of life for updates on
Friday, December 7, 2007.
Fedora 7 will remain supported until one month past the release of Fedora 9
(as things stand, this would be roughly through the end of May, 2008).
- The Fedora Board
Lastly, do I see some management problems here? I mean, if you are having so much problem with the departure of a staff, to the point of having to change the OS multiple times, clearly there is some problem with the human resource management and ops and support planning. Is there any plan on the course of action to take to keep the system going in case the system admin is down? Is there no person who can cover for him? In response to the comment "We spent three weeks doing that all because of one guy," I'll say that the guy is not the system admin, but his manager.
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