Free, Libre and Open Source in Trinidad & Tobago.

Me, last presenter at the FLOS Caribbean Conference, 2003.

I don’t know if it’s a factor of age or experience – I consider them mutually exclusive – but when I saw a job opening for an Open Source Consultant here in Trinidad and Tobago, I thought back to how things were and how they have changed in the last 20 years since the FLOS Caribbean conference.

The short answer is that nothing has really changed.

It wasn’t long after that conference that the University of the West Indies was said to have signed an agreement with Microsoft. I imagine the Government of Trinidad and Tobago is paying Microsoft Office 365 subscription fees rather than using LibreOffice, and every time I get a hint of the back end of the results of government contracts related to technology, I see .Net. These are not good or bad things, but they are things that I think Trinidad and Tobago and other nations across the world spend money on rather than building their own experience pool.

That has been, and always will be, the most important aspect of open source software when it comes to a national economy. Sure, you can buy things off the shelf now from other nations, using your foreign exchange for that, but you can also develop the intellectual capital within a nation to meet those same needs. For reasons I do not pretend to understand, this hasn’t been considered a ‘good’ choice over the years in Trinidad and Tobago. Personally, I found my experiences in culture, ICT and open source to be of worth, but we are always measured by the values of others.

I applied for the consultancy position. It might be nice to get a nice 6 month stretch of helping the government save money in the long term while building something sturdy and of value, though I do worry that as a consultant advice will be ignored. That’s the trouble of being a consultant, and it’s also the blessing of being a consultant as well – you can advise your best with a clear conscience and let the chips fall where they may.

There may be hope that Trinidad and Tobago is ready to get serious about technology and innovation, and this could bode well as we have entered the age of large language models and promises of general Artificial Intelligence. It could also be just a position advertised so some Minister’s relative gets a gig to get paid to give crappy advice.

Time will tell.

I do stay in touch with folks from all the conferences that we had, some even sponsored by governments within the Caribbean, and we’ve all pushed ahead in our own ways. I haven’t seen the new generation, though.

I’ll have to ask around and see if they exist.

One thought on “Free, Libre and Open Source in Trinidad & Tobago.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *