Strange Symphonies The best way to predict the future is to invent it

An Idea

I was on the LRT yesterday on the way to KLCC, going to attend xwing's and sey's birthday. Happy Birthday guys. LRT rides are time for introspection into how things are. They provide you a great time to think as you easily know where you are going without thinking, and there should be close to no distractions. Except for other passengers on board the train of course. I was thinking about the .my foss situation, and how it can be improved.

Before I continue, its probably best if you read kearu's Lack of Capacity blog post.

In fact I would like to point out the line: "You'll get a small constant pool of skilled developers, each learning on their own."

Maybe we should stop targetting the housewives and start targeteting more developers, namely the stduents. Less preaching of "What you can do with GNU/Linux", and more "What can you develope with FOSS tools, and what are the benefits." Teaching housewives, well maybe I shouldn't use that term, but students on how to use GNU/Linux appears to be a waste of time for me now. Because really, how much do they really care? All they want is a tool that works. Plus if they disappear, and go back to using some other proprietary operating system, they would have carried no skillset with them. Which is a loss for both me and the housewive. As we wasted time for no reason. If we concentrate on development, at least they can carry any skills they have learnt. Eventhough they may develope proprietary systems, at least they carry along with them a good skill set, and hopefully they make good software ( though it still is closed source ).

I was having talks with Ditesh sometime ago, and he praised how Linux Australia came about, from the developer seeds, the same with the Sri Lanka Foundation. He also says that the users:bug reporters:developers ratio is about 1000:10:1, which somehow to me seems about right. So if we can create one developer, we would have essentially have another 1000 users. Of course this is all theoretical, but either way, I believe this is a better way to increase both the number of developers and users.

The ideas is to have workshops. But the problem is that these workshops, must not TEACH on how to learn the language, but focus on what you can do with the language. Thus you sieve through the beginners, and get to developing. PHP comes into mind when I say this. What are you trying to teach? The language or some library?

I asked around on #myoss ( which is probably not the best place to take statistics ) on what languages are students proficient in.

Some say PHP and VB. Another says C++. Another says C++ and Java.

This breaks down to available skill sets in .my to teach the interested parties. Particularly, I have no C/C++/Java, all I have is PHP ( this hopes to be fixed in a few months ). Yes there are other people in .my with these skills, but can they really take a day off work to attend some developer/workshop sessions with people?

Well where to from here? I don't know. I just needed to get that idea out of my head. Maybe after the event tomorrow and seeing another student population, I'll have a better answer for you.