David Mandala said:
> On Fri, 2003-05-23 at 10:40, Derek Neighbors wrote:
> [snip]It depends on who does the licensing.  For example MCSE, CCNA,
> RHCE are
>> all bad in my book because they are promoted directly by a company
>> that is licensing only to get people with certs so that they can sell
>> more products.
>>
>> A+ certification which is far more neutral or SAIR certification are
>> much less biased.  The problem I see today with licensing efforts is
>> that they are corporate driven.
>
> Actually had you said A+ or LPI (Linux Professional Institute) you would
> have been more correct, however the SAIR cert only exists to sell their
> training programs, it is not a neutral cert by any means though they
> push it that way for sure.

I did say A+.  I get LPI and SAIR mixed up all the time.  While SAIR is
selling its training, its not 'vendor' biased (best I can tell).  I
definitely should have listed LPI.

>> This leaves it up to non-profits or the government to make a neutral
>> license.  Non-profits have to have money, likely their money would
>> come from the 'vendors', so while it would say 'neutral' in reality it
>> would be far from it (though better than direct product
>> certification).
>>
>
> LPI is non profit, it gets it cash from donations from vendors (though
> many of the vendors are hardware folks) and from the test process. Also
> most of the work has been done by volunteers though not all of it by any
> means. LPI was built by the Linux community for the Linux community and
> makes strong attempts to stay vendor neutral and focused on quality.

The GNU/Linux route should definitely be community based.  LPI is likely a
good start down that road.  The problem is getting companies to trust a
community based certification program.

-Derek