From mailing list to institute
LPI is the first (and, so far, the only)
vendor-neutral
program that is noncommercial, open, and community based. The
organization's
roots are in two mailing lists that, originally unbeknownst to each other, were
kicking
around ideas on Linux certification in the latter part of 1998. One list,
moderated by Evan Leibovitch, was the outgrowth of a conference
sponsored by
the Canadian Linux Users Enthusiasts (CLUE), and included representatives
from
Caldera and SuSE.
In September 1998, computer-training professional Dan York, unaware
of the
Canadian list, wrote an article for Linux Gazette's October 1, 1998
issue
that included a call to action on the certification front and asked if
there
were any forums in which discussion of these issues was already under
way.
When York's article aroused a flurry of interest, Linuxcare CTO Dave
Sifry
offered to set up a public mailing list, which became Linux-cert. In
November
1998, Jon "Maddog" Hall, executive director of Linux International, introduced
York
to Leibovitch; seeing that the aims of the two discussions
were in
concert, they merged the mailing lists and, around the beginning of
1999,
launched LPI as a registered nonprofit. Today, over 300 people participate in
LPI's
several mailing lists. York is chair of the six-person LPI board,
and
Leibovitch is executive director.
I contacted Dan York a few days before the inaugural exam launch; he was
obviously pleased and excited at this upcoming major milestone. The exam is
available
(in English only, at the moment) at 1,700 Virtual University Enterprises
(VUE)
testing centers around the world; people can register either in person
or
online (see the Resources section below for registration information). As of January 6, over
1,900
people had asked LPI to notify them when the first exam became
available.
How many of them will actually take the exam is, of course, unknown, but
York
said, "We assume there's a great interest out there." And quite a bit of that interest
comes from outside the United States.
Great interest was certainly in
evidence
after the January 11 launch. In the first 48 hours after registration
for LPI
exams opened, over 300 people took the first step in the registration process by requesting LPI exam IDs from VUE.
LPI has identified three levels of certification. The first level is
targeted
at junior system administrators and consists of three exams, the first
two of
which (T1a and T1b) test fundamental system-administration skills. T1a
is
available; according to York, T1b is almost ready for technical and
psychometric review now, and is a few weeks away from deployment.
The second level is intended to certify senior system administrators working on
multiple
systems and networks. The third level will consist of a series of
elective
exams; LPI recognizes that, as system administrators move further along in their careers, they tend to specialize. So far, the specific objectives for
only
the first-level exams are laid out in detail on LPI's Website (see Resources).
The T1a exam is actually launching as a beta, so that LPI can
determine how
well the questions perform, and compute the all-important
passing
score. The beta will still count toward certification; the only real
drawback
for those first few hundred test-takers in the beta period will be a
delay in
receiving their scores while measurement issues are sorted out.
LPI has truly been an open project, produced by a dedicated group of
contributors, many of them volunteers, who operate as a virtual
community over
the Internet. The structure of the program, and the questions
themselves, are
based on input from the Linux community. Questions go through a
technical review conducted by 20 volunteers, then pass to LPI's staff
psychometricians, who determine if a question will work in an exam
context.
And LPI is always looking for more community involvement, says York.
Even with the dedicated efforts of the corps of folks -- the board and
volunteers -- who've been with the project from the beginning, "we
always need
more people. There are never enough to do all the things you'd like to
do."
Even Red Hat is "involved in a small way," according to Donnie Barnes,
Red
Hat's director of technical projects and a member of LPI's advisory
board.
Red Hat, whose own certification program has produced nearly 600 Red Hat
Certified Engineers (RHCE) since it began in February 1999, has adopted
a
wait-and-see attitude about the possibility of a deeper connection.
Barnes
told me that the company is "always interested in vendor-neutral
[certification] efforts originating from the community in particular."
However, he added, "that said, we've got a market-proven program in place, too. So we
have
the best of both worlds right now. It's all good for Linux."
LPI is open and noncommercial -- but it's not free (as in free beer). LPI has
needed financial sponsorship from Caldera, SuSE, Linuxcare, IBM, SGI,
TurboLinux, and others (including, in fact, Wave Technologies). The
organization hopes ultimately to become self sustaining -- which requires
that
fees be charged. According to York, only a "small slice" of the $100
exam fee
will come back to LPI. Through these fees, LPI hopes to recover its costs
and be
able to fund further exam development, psychometric analysis, and
deployment,
without depending heavily on industry sponsors.
SAIR: First to market
LPI's timeline calls for all of its first-level exams to be available
in the
first half of 2000. But certification-hungry professionals (or their
employers) may not care to wait, when SAIR's program, while still also
under
development, is already several steps ahead. SAIR offers three tiers of
certification:
- SAIR Linux and GNU Certified Administrator (LCA): Tests the
Linux knowledge that a power user, help-desk staffer, or system
administrator should have
- SAIR Linux and GNU Certified Engineer (LCE): Tests for knowledge that a
full-time
system manager should have
- Master SAIR Linux and GNU Certified Engineer (MLCE): Tests for knowledge that a senior system administrator or manager should have
As of this writing, the LCA-level exams are available worldwide (in
English)
at 2,000 Sylvan Prometric testing centers; LCE- and MLCE-level exams will be ready
within
weeks. Each exam costs $99.
SAIR boasts an impressive roster of open source activists on its board
of
advisers: Eric Raymond, author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and
"The
Magic Cauldron"; his ideological rival Richard Stallman, founder of the
Free
Software Foundation; Jon "Maddog" Hall of Linux International; and
Debian
developer and licensing guru Bruce Perens.
Tobin Maginnis, an associate professor of computer science at the
University
of Mississippi, is founder and president of SAIR Linux and GNU
Certification. He established SAIR in 1992 as a custom-programming
company, then began thinking about Linux certification in 1997 after
being inspired by a student's question.
Maginnis published an article in the April 1999 issue of Linux
Journal, in
which he presented the logic behind certification for Linux and stated
his
intention to begin certification work.
He then began to craft a knowledge base -- a comprehensive array of information on
which the exams could be based, and which would identify in detail the tasks performed
and
know-how needed by Linux sysadmins and engineers. According to Maginnis,
the
knowledge base was a personal brain dump made possible by his 20 years
of
high-level computer-science teaching and practice, "fine-tuned and
shuffled"
with "extremely valuable" comments and suggestions from the community.
As of
this writing, the knowledge base for the LCA level is on the SAIR site,
with
the other levels to follow. (See Resources for more information.)
Will the twain meet?
Both LPI and SAIR espouse the conviction that a single standard for
Linux
certification is best for people seeking certification, for industry
hiring
needs, and for industry acceptance of Linux. There are significant
differences
between SAIR's and LPI's programs, and between the two organizations
themselves, but their fundamental goals and methods are arguably
similar. And
both have the apparent endorsement of people whose judgment is valued by
the
Linux community. Dan York, speaking prior to Wave's acquisition of SAIR,
seemed guardedly hopeful that LPI and SAIR could come closer together,
but he
sees a win either way: "The good news is that all the certification
programs
help grow the pool of people that support Linux, and at the end of the
day
that's the most important thing."
In a recent Slashdot interview, Hall said,
"[Linux International's]
members encouraged both SAIR and the LPI in their standards efforts." He
said
he expected that certification seekers and hiring managers would decide which
program was best.
It may well be the case that forces other than the Linux-certification
consumer market will determine if the two programs will merge, compete,
or simply coexist, however. Wave Technologies, SAIR's new parent company, may in fact
turn out to be the catalyst that transforms a unified Linux certification
standard into more than an unapproachable grail. Wave,
a company founded in 1988, offers training for the whole alphabet
soup of
vendor certifications, and knows its way around the business of computer
certification. And Wave has demonstrated, since well before the SAIR
acquisition, a strong interest in adding certification-targeted Linux
training
to its portfolio, as evidenced by the fact that it is a Charter Gold
Sponsor
of LPI (which means that it was an early contributor of an amount between $25,000 and $50,000). Wave's president and founder, Ken Kousky, is a member of LPI's
advisory
board.
I spoke with Ken Kousky and Tobin Maginnis the day after
the
acquisition of SAIR by Wave was announced, and asked whether Wave would abandon its work
with
LPI in favor of its new subsidiary. Clearly not, according to Maginnis.
"We
believe that there should be one Linux certification. And we want to
work with
others to bring that about. We are in discussion with LPI about working
toward
that goal."
Kousky elaborated further: "We certainly don't want a long-term
competition
with five or ten teeny Linux certification efforts. SAIR and Wave seek a
partnership with a Linux certification body" -- a consortium -- "that
provides
an open governance process (where membership is open and the membership
has
final and absolute control) and infrastructure -- an organization that
has
credibility in supporting a very rigorous and robust certification
process.
We're very open-minded in terms of who those partners can and should
be." He
made it clear that LPI is one of several entities he wants to work with
to
build such a consortium. Kousky emphasized that a global certification
program
requires a lot of infrastructure, and said that SAIR is committed to
partnering with
others to better meet that challenge. Wave and SAIR, Kousky and Maginnis said, hope to
create
initiative in the certification movement, more than carry it forward.
It makes perfect sense that Wave wants to be in on the ground floor of
training for Linux certification -- clearly a growth market -- and that
such
training's value will be enhanced if it addresses a unified,
industry-endorsed, vendor-neutral standard. Moreover, a single
certification
standard for Linux aligns Wave's Linux training with the existing model
-- the
single-vendor certification model its present corporate clients find
familiar
-- that has brought the company success so far.
It seems Wave's strategy is to take advantage of the role that SAIR has carved
out in
Linux certification in order to position itself advantageously once (and if) a single
standard for Linux certification is hammered out. If that turns out to
benefit
everyone -- certification-seeking Linux professionals, the companies
that want
to hire them, the Linux industry, and the training industry -- so much
the
better.
A hundred certification flowers?
And yet, of course, there's nothing to prevent a hundred
Linux-certification
flowers from trying to bloom in both commercial and noncommercial soil.
A
couple of vendor-neutral certification outfits have folded their Linux
programs into LPI, or are in the process of doing so. A few other
inchoate
efforts have recently surfaced. One interested party, the Enterprise Certified Corporation,
describes itself as a "vendor-neutral organization offering test-based
certification and curriculum for IT professionals involved with issues
of
interoperability." Another is SAGE, the system administrators guild (an
STG
within the venerable nonprofit USENIX association). Dan York of LPI is a
member of the six-person SAGE Certification Subcommittee.
LinuxNerds.com is another nascent program that's interesting in a
garage-band
kind of way. Started by a couple of computer consultants in New Mexico, the company this past December put out a call for contributions from the community
for
questions "in essay form" to use in a "comprehensive Linux certification
test"
that "would be issued over the Web at no cost to the Linux community."
I spoke with LinuxNerd James Gill, a zealous fellow who thinks that the
multiple-choice, hands-off, closed-book exam model used by LPI and SAIR
does
not address the fact that "a good admin doesn't necessarily need to know
the
correct answers, but how to find them; that's what we want to test."
The LinuxNerds plan
to stage real-world problem situations on Linux servers on their network
and
have test-takers attempt to resolve them in realtime, with whatever
help
they may need to go out and get. It will be "open book, open source,
open
friend," says Gill. Performance would be judged not merely on the basis
of
results, but also on the type and degree of effort put into the
attempted
solution and the speed at which it's performed.
When I talked to Gill in early January, he said the project had received
only
about 35 test questions from the community, but that he'd gotten a lot
of
encouragement from the contributors. He admitted the March launch date
posted
on the site was overly optimistic, but said he's not feeling any
pressure.
"Pressure? We want to do it right, and with a price tag of free there's
really
no pressure. Hopefully the quality will speak for itself. It's a tiny,
tiny,
tiny, tiny snowball right now. We're working off word of mouth. We have
no
capital, we're doing it in our spare time; we'll give it what we've got,
then
we'll give it more."
Quixotic though the LinuxNerds effort might seem, it perhaps represents
the
best in pure-hearted Linux devotion. "I'm doing this from the goodness
of my
heart," said Gill. "I've taken a lot from the Linux community. It's
always
been there for me. Sun newsgroups can be rude. I've never seen a rude
response
to a legitimate question on a Linux newsgroup. I love that."
Resources
