The good news about open source, Cobol, and mobile jobs

In a bleak year, open source employment stayed relatively strong, as did the demand for Cobol skills

Journalists are often the bearers of bad news; it simply comes with the territory. And with the economy in the tank, there's no shortage of ugly stories to cover. So I'm always pleased when there's a legitimate bit of good news to write about. And counterintuitively enough, three of my columns this year contained good news about employment for techies, despite the downturn.

Open source jobs remain in good shape
In July, I looked at a report that showed that as many as 15 percent of the available IT jobs call for open source skills. Although the report was written before the financial meltdown gathered steam, it still turned out to be a good indicator of the job market.

I know that because several months later, a careful look at the layoffs cascading though Silicon Valley showed that few of the job losses -- and there were many -- took place at companies primarily focused on open source.

Here's the gist of the jobs report:

Looking for a good job in IT? Sharpen your knowledge of open-source development frameworks, languages, and programming. A just-published study of available IT jobs found that 5 to 15 percent of the positions now on the market call for open source software skills.

The fastest-growing segments of the open source job market include Alfresco, Django, and Drupal, although those represent only a small percentage of the total. Other segments that grew by more than 100 percent in the first four months of this year from the same period last year include LAMP, Ruby on Rails, and VMware.

Demand for Linux server skills grew by only 18 percent -- but as you'd expect, that segment has far more postings than any other. Similarly, JavaScript and Perl, which have been popular for some time, grew slowly but from a large base.

The story on the surprising strength of open source employment was sparked by reports of a brutally negative meeting held by Sequoia Capital with its stable of startups.

I asked Matt Asay, a vice president of Alfresco and a veteran open source exec, for his take: "On average, I don't think many open source companies are affected by Sequoia's counsel precisely because we didn't overbuild in the first place. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with superior management at open source companies, but rather a built-in throttle that scales hiring to downloads and other indicators of incoming interest in one's open source product. As such, we tend to hire more cautiously and only when the market has demonstrated that it can support those hires."