The two biggest companies selling GNU/Linux, distributor Red Hat and reseller Novell, do offer their own training courses but a source of worry is that at the university-level the take-up of computer science is falling dramatically. Universities are trimming IT teachers and this means that a great many who take to the tech field do so without the basics installed (pun intended).

Companies, by and large, look to hire younger and less experienced workers, seeking, to a large extent, to recruit people at a lower cost. At the same time, the candidate is expected to have skills in several directions. A "tech" person is expected to look after a multitude of systems, many as different from each other as chalk is from cheese. In this kind of scenario, an admin with basic training and a few years' work under his or her belt does not really have much of a chance.

A person with good or better skills is often left alone and classified as over-qualified. That he or she would have to be paid more in the event of being hired is more than just a part of the reason.

To some extent, it is a chicken and egg situation but more of a question of sudden demand and then a falloff. Up to the end of 1999, there was a huge demand for all kinds of tech people, including GNU/Linux admins; then there was a dropoff. Now there is a surge again and one cannot tell when or whether there will be a decline.

The extent to which trained and well-equipped GNU/Linux admins exist will have a big impact on the take-up of the operating system at the desktop level - any company which has a good admin looking after the big boxes, will, no doubt, be more inclined to dip their toe in the GNU/Linux desktop waters. Others will take the low road.

In the long run, it generally works out cheaper for a company to have someone in-house (for any kind of job, not Linux administration alone) than to go in for support contracts with outsiders - and before anyone starts shouting, remember, I said in the long run. Short-term it is cheaper to outsource the work and pay a price for it down the line - it doesn't matter, you would have taken your bonus and gone.

GNU/Linux is more difficult to administer than Windows but it has a very strong point - once you have got something working, then the only time when it will stop is when hardware fails. People with itchy fingers sometimes find this a problem! On Windows, things fail repeatedly for little or no good reason; oft times, one sets things right again but has no idea how it was achieved.

Given that many people are hoping and predicting that 2007 or 2008 will be the year of the Linux desktop - I'm not among that number - companies which are trying to make this a reality will also have to look at churning out administrators for all those boxes. Else, any efforts to spread the good oil will fail - and miserably too. {moscomment}

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Linux  Microsoft  Open Source  Sam Varghese  Software