But there’s a catch: Whereas users can receive training from
Red Hat and even become certified in Linux, they’re on their own
when it comes to the security applications. “It’s more a matter of
getting to know the application, using it and researching it on the
Web,” Miller says. He tends to hire internally for his team, and so
far all of his people have had to learn on the job. While the basics
come pretty quickly, Miller says, the tools are more difficult to
master than their commercial counterparts, and it might take a
year to become really comfortable with some of them.
Across industries, demand is growing for people with open-source skills because the number of open-source projects is on
the rise. In fact, one of the first challenges enterprises face when
hiring outside
contractors:
15%
training in-house:
85%
Collision Course
n A lack of in-house expertise
n staff training
n
source
use of open
20 Computerworld May 9, 2011
adopting open-source applications is that they might not have
the skills they need in-house. In a survey conducted by
Computerworld in March, 56% of the 159 respondents said that they expect
their organizations’ use of open source to increase in the next six
months. In a Computerworld survey last year, 47% of the 143 respondents said they anticipated an increase. More than half (51%)
of this year’s respondents also said their use of open source had
increased in the previous six months (see charts at left).
In the March survey, 57% of the respondents pointed to a lack of
in-house skills as the No. 1 perceived barrier to open-source adoption. Moreover, staff training was cited as the most costly aspect of
an open-source software implementation.
“The biggest benefit of open source, in addition to the cost
savings, is development speed,” says Alice Hill, managing director
of Dice.com. “But if you have to spend all your time training your
C++ developers in Ruby on Rails, you might lose that benefit.”
Dice.com is seeing demand for open-source skills in its job
postings. Since 2010, the number of postings for all technology
jobs has grown by 25%, whereas the number of postings seeking
people with Linux, Python or Ruby on Rails expertise has grown
31%, 53% and 84%, respectively (see “Right Skills, Right Time,”
page 24). In some cases, employers are offering higher salaries to
people with open-source skills. While IT salaries have been gen-
erally flat year over year, salaries for people who know Python
are up 7.1%, and salaries for those with Perl expertise are up
4.3%. “We’re definitely seeing larger increases for these scripting
languages,” says Hill. “People are willing to pay more for those.”
Additionally, IT professionals skilled in Linux tend to earn
as much as 10% more than their peers, according to Dice. The
average salary for people familiar with Red Hat and Novell SUSE
Linux is $87,500, compared with $79,000 for IT workers overall.
Companies that need open-source skills are offering all kinds of
working arrangements, says Hill, noting that job postings are evenly
distributed across full-time, contract and telecommuting positions.
Feeling their way
A paper published in the March 2010 issue of the Association
for Computing Machinery’s Communications of the ACM magazine also cited a dearth of expertise as a barrier to open-source
adoption. According to the paper, titled “The Organizational
Adoption of Open Source Software: Barriers and Remedies,” the
problem is threefold: Companies may be unaware of open-source
applications that are relevant to their businesses; managers may
be aware of open-source applications but lack the knowledge
required to implement them; or managers may be unaware of the
support services available to assist with implementation, since
open-source software projects are often run by volunteer organizations that don’t have big marketing or advertising budgets.
John Biderman, director of strategic development and informa-
tion technology at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, agrees that it
takes time to develop the in-house expertise needed to support
open-source initiatives. Harvard Pilgrim, a Wellesley, Mass.-based
health insurer, has implemented Media Wiki, a free open-source
wiki package written in PHP, but its IT department is a Java shop,
and the staffers had no particular PHP skills. “We had one guy who
knew enough to use the config files and set things up, but no PHP
expertise,” Biderman says. As a result, he adds, “if we wanted to
modify the system at all or extend it, we wouldn’t be able to.”
Version management is another challenge. “The open-source
