[forwarding on behalf of V. Sasi Kumar ]

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Fsf-friends] Linux Technology Extension(LiTE) centre Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 10:09:17 +0530 From: V. Sasi Kumar vsasi@hotpop.com To: rajshekhar@hotpop.com References: 1098251044.2235.15.camel@localhost.localdomain 41772CA1.4070107@hotpop.com

On Thu, 2004-10-21 at 08:57, Raj Shekhar wrote:

The schools (both public and private) teach Microsoft technologies and the government is planning to start Linux support centers. Where will these centers find manpower to provide support ? Or will the old Indian "connection" (or jugaad .. if you understand hindi) come into play for hiring?

Personally, I had a hard time finding good (or even average) PHP programmers for my company. Most freshers had been taught ASP/JSP, since that was "prescribed" in their college. Have you thought of this part of the problem ? Personally, I think the schools should start teaching perl/python instead of Basic. Colleges should start teaching QT/wxPython for GUI design. However they cannot. Why ? Because they do not have teachers. A bit of a chicken and egg problem. And opening LiTE is certainly not going to help.

Yes, I am a cynical about all things Indian government does.

On the other hand, one of the reasons cited for teaching proprietary technology is that employers need only that. If the student has to get some job after passing out, he needs to know MS Word, Pagemaker, AutoCAD, and whatever. So if the word goes around that there are a number of jobs waiting for people trained in free software, that is going to provide an incentive for people to go and study just that from wherever they can.

Another positive side is that the IT@School programme is developing a GNU/Linux distribution of its own, which would include a lot of packages that are helpful for teachers and students. If proper information and training are given to the teaching community, I feel this should pretty soon become very popular here.