Lack of Capacity

Foundation and regional co-operation

Lack of capacity

I keep hearing this again and again. The problem with developing countries that are more developed such as Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam is that they are already in the dependency trap of proprietary software (check RMS's speech at WSIS). What this means is that there is already a lack of skills and knowledge starting from academic institutions. Students are reduced to end-user developers (a made up term) not developers who understand the concepts and design of the software they're using. They can't because it's proprietary, they can't study the code and if they saw it they can't update/reimplement it. FOSS removes the these limitations, but as Dr. Hakken observed in Malaysia, everybody then seems to be learning on their own stumbling upon FOSS in one way or the other. This can be daunting until they participate in the international FOSS community or local LUGs. This may not be possible if they lack cheap internet access or not in a capital city where the user groups usually are.

FOSS gives free access to this knowledge to bridge the gap, but developing countries must create the foundations to address this skills shortage. Mark Shuttleworth also notes this as one of the greatest challenges that developing countries face in terms of development with regards to ICT and software. Unlike end-user training (which in this case can also include system administrators) that simply configure or use software; software development knowledge is a continuous process that can take 1-3 years. A key point to note, is that this not lack of FOSS skills that many people complain about, but the skills and knowledge to manage and work in large projects, to develop key system components like the kernel (Linux, BSD), file systems (XFS, EXT3, UFS), databases (BDB, PostgreSQL), frameworks (Zope3, WACT, RoR), applications (OpenOffice, Evolution, Thunderbird) down to the computer languages and compilers (gcc, python, php, mono).

Currently:

• Students don't have opportunity to learn at this level at universities and lecturers unable to teach (using and having knowledge of using proprietary software only). An analogy would be students who learn to drive, not become mechanics.
  
• Small employment pool of highly skilled developers.
  
• Few FOSS companies with only a few skilled developers who end up doing multiple tasks (due to shortage)

How can we solve this?

One large problem is the small base of local skilled developers. Remove those with the ability to teach and a few companies hiring the talented few and we're not ever going to solve this problem. You'll get a small constant pool  of skilled developers, each learning on their own.

To solve this problem requires co-operation and a long term view (3-5 years).

• Local co-operation between acadamic institutions, commercial companies and the community such as that by Lanka Software Foundation. Universities need to start using FOSS software to teach their classes. If they're teaching Operating Systems.. use Linux or BSD and teach the students the real thing down to the design and code.  Some lecturers are already starting to this, all of them should be doing this.
  
• Regional co-operation between FOSS support companies.

We hope to have a Malaysian foundation before second half of the year for the first point.
The second one, I'm not sure. There is Asia-OSS coming up and also LinuxWorld Australia maybe some ideas can be bounced around then.

This issue has been frustrating me lately, but access to this technical knowledge through FOSS is still quite new in developing countries and it is not easy to break out of a dependency. As long as small steps can be made to address the problems, the situation can only get better.