Letter to the Register in response to this
“There is an increasing demand for high-value, high-paying jobs that require skills in open standards technologies like Linux,…” – what does she base this on? Where is the research?

Nope, I’m still working on the old Oracle technologies (not even Java) on windows, despite the fact that I know the new stuff quite well and am a Unix hacker from way back. The Unix stuff has always been faster and easier to work with, but not many people were using it.

A casual perusal on skillsite and gisajob of the jobs using stuff like PHP, Python etc. shows that the salaries are 2-5k lower than mainstream products, usually for small companies, and there aren’t that many of them.

It’s the big corporations that can afford the big salaries and they buy Oracle, IBM etc.. Java has become popular but its popularlity is a function of how it is the lowest common denominator, rather than how powerful it is. Java development is what C development used to be; although it’s slightly quicker because there is so much out there that others have done but at the end of the day it is very slow going to do anything new.