Open Source professionals higher skills, higher paid: survey

Stan Beer
Monday, 10 March 2008 18:12

Business IT - Open Source

"Things like that you tend to learn better from the Open Source community in a very practical sense that aren't being provided by the universities. So all of these companies are looking at people coming out of the universities and people coming out of the Open Source communities and finding it much easier to employ someone from the Open Source community who has that practical experience and has exposed that experience online. When you hire people from university and the proprietary software world you never get to see what they've done."

According to Waugh, the research from the survey indicates that there is a clear gap in the IT education system.

"We did quite a bit about education from both sides - the kind of education that the industry is interested in and the education that people in the community have. Folks in the community generally regarded the most important education as being their participation in a community rather than the other places they learned such as university. Right now in the industry, there is more value placed on employees who have already participated in the Open Source world and also who have worked for Open Source companies previously. It shows that there is a gap in the education provided to get people going in the industry."

So what were the hot Open Source areas being worked on?

"Web technologies had a very high showing in terms where companies were making their money," says Waugh. "People were doing things built on Java, Rails, PHP and so on. Platforms and web technologies figured very highly. There were also people doing Open Source software for embedded applications."

Waugh says that almost all of the companies surveyed in the Open Source census 2007 make their money from a classic Open Source services model - software development, customisation, implementation, migration, support and maintenance. 46% of the survey respondents took 70% or more of their revenue from Open Source activities.

The survey, which will be freely available, is slated to be released as a downloadable PDF on the evening of April 1.

According to Waugh Partners, the research provides insights into:


    * Understanding innovation and R & D in Open Source - the flow on benefits and opportunity for Australia
    * Skills identification, development, demand, and careers
    * Revenue generation and business models
    * Industry and community relationship and metrics
    * Organisations and projects in Australia.