OS and certification

Rhodes Hileman rhodes at smsys.com
Wed Jun 9 09:13:20 PDT 1999


Peg Holman wrote:
>
> What did I stumble across but this:  http://www.ourfuture.com/oscert.htm
> (it's a consulting firm -- Cornerstone Consulting -- that offers
> CERTIFICATION in doing OS)
> This is still bothering me so thought I see what others think.

The need for certification of expertise on specific products, and the
outfits who pander to it are a plague in our civilization.  It has been
recently written about in another context, computer systems, by Les Bell
in the May 99 issues of "Extended Attributes" published by the Phoenix
OS/2 Society http://www.possi.org/ . Les asserts that, "the current
drive for vendor-specific certification is a blight on our society."  He
goes on the explain that spending money to obtain certification of
expertise in a particular system has the effect of marrying you to that
system, so you will recommend it to your customers, consistently
overlooking other choices.  This makes the likes of Mr. Gates even
richer. "It's all about vendor lock-in."

When something works, it has a tendency to be sold, which creates an
opportunity for paid consultants, which creates an opportunity for the
certifiers.  Open Space Technology is a lot like the Open Software
movement, now most prominently represented by Linux: everyone involved
is an expert, the work is done for the pleasure of seeing a better
result, the technology is pretty much bullet proof because it has been
through so many hands.

And the commercial folks are just itching to make some money off it.

--
Rhodes Hileman . http://www.smsys.com/smaladdr.html



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