In the 1960s (say), if you bought a computer, it cost you a few million dollars, and you accepted that you needed to spend serious money on High Priests in White Coats to feed it and care for it... and think hard about how to make that expensive beast do the best for your needs.

Cheap PCs and shrink-wrap software have given rise to the (mostly-implicit) notion that system administrators shouldn't exist. And if they insist on doing so, they should be as cheap as the hardware they look after. Certainly, in the corporate world, "IT" is mostly seen as a cost to be controlled -- nothing more, nothing less. And it's a big self-delusion mostly: a company may not be spending money on "system administrators", but there are probably plenty of non-"system administrators" devoting huge fractions of their time to, um, well, guess what...

Nonetheless, it is still a tough time to be arguing "Yes, the hardware is cheap, but you really would be wise to spend Real Money on the people to help you do Wondrous and Amazing Things with it".

At no point, 1960s or now, have sysadmins been given any respect whatsoever :-)

"Open source" and sysadmin

A stated aim of the Arusha Project is to develop "a sysadmin equivalent to open-source software development". We are not implying that we're the first folks to think of such a thing...

The early days of Unix, when you got a "no-support" Unix source tape from Bell Labs, were very open-source-ish -- code and ideas were very freely exchanged. Even more true after BSD Unix came into its own, and networking started to be pervasive.

If you had BSD Unix in (say) 1980, you expected to hack on your kernel [and everything else] (and to pay someone to do so). It was nothing for a CS dept to say, "Oh, we'll have to write a driver for that, then". And such code was quite freely exchanged.

Nowadays, the picture has changed. The huge majority of people run stock kernels, for example. Fortunately, the onslaught of free Unices is taking us back closer to the Old Ways (and a good thing, too: see our "sourceism" comments).

We do have open-source activity for many packages that sysadmins use -- very lovely, too... -- and we have newsgroups/mailing-lists which can be most helpful for getting help with problems, etc.

But there's no "open-source"-like stuff for the actual hardcore sysadmin-ish stuff that happens! E.g. "Here's the exact way I got my ACME Whizzy 200 printer to work via Appletalk..." There's a whole swathe of sysadmin "added value" that isn't being exchanged, reused, etc., in any systematic way.

We hope the Arusha Project will fix that.