as a developing country
with an emerging pool of talented,
industrious programmers,
India was once seen as
a natural fit for open-source
software. But today, while the
country has software developers
by the thousand, only a
fraction of them do work in
the open-source area.
A big reason is that most
developers work for large outsourcing
companies, where
decisions about whether to
develop proprietary or opensource
software are largely
dictated by their customers.
The number of independent
developers in the country
probably adds up to no more
than about 2,000, says Vinay
Deshpande, chairman of
Encore Software, an embedded
software and product
design company in Bangalore.
The rest work for companies
where their choice of software
is decided for them.
Of those who work for
companies, most are highly
career-oriented and don’t
contribute to open-source
projects in their spare time,
says Muthu Krishnan, head
of the Indian operation of
CollabNet, which provides
services for distributed development
projects. Indian software
company employees
have little spare time because
they typically work late hours,
he added.
“I used to participate in
open-source projects when I
was in college and even in my
fi rst job, but now work pressures
and deadlines don’t give
me any time to do it,” said a
developer at the Indian operations
of Dell, who asked not to
be quoted by name.
As a result, probably less
than two percent of India’s
developers contribute to
open-source projects, according
to R.K.V.S. Raman, senior
staff scientist in the National
Center for Software Technology
(NCST). NCST works
with open-source groups on
projects such as localizing
open-source software for
Indian languages.
Developers’ interest in
Linux and open source has
also been lukewarm in India
because they were not certain
whether users would adopt
open source, according to
Deshpande, who helped
develop a handheld Linux
computer called the Simputer
for developing countries.
For sure, India is not averse
to the open-source model, and
there are reasons why it could
yet take hold.
“The cost of proprietary
software is as much as the
cost of the computer in India,
so people are either not able
to take advantage of technology
to the full, or have to resort
to using pirated software,”
says Prakash Advani, a cofounder
of IndLinux.org, a
project to develop local language
versions of the Linux
operating system.
If computer literacy is to
spread beyond English-speaking
urban elites and to the
country’s rural masses, software
is needed that supports
India’s numerous languages
and dialects. The country has
more than a dozen “offi cial”
languages and many more
that are used besides.
Although Microsoft has
introduced some localized
versions of Windows and
Office, the centralized
approach does not give users
the freedom to introduce
nuances of their particular
region, Advani says.
Indian developers are starting
to get involved in opensource
development as an
outlet for their creativity, and
because some have a passion
for the development model,
Encore’s Deshpande says. By
his estimate, about 10,000
developers in India participate
in open-source development
in their spare time, partially
to relieve boredom at work.
“India is not yet a hotbed for
Linux development, but it
could become one soon,”
Deshpande says.
More developers are showing
interest in writing software
for the Simputer, as they are
beginning to see money being
made from the effort, he said.
Some Indian companies
that do open-source development,
as well as development
subsidiaries of multinationals
like Yahoo, encourage developers
to participate in opensource
communities, since
they consider open source as
important to their business
objectives, Raman said.
Still, the involvement in
such communities is driven
largely by employer policies,
rather than developer initiative,
he said.
Cultural factors also play a
part. Developers in India get
the social recognition they
need from their jobs and the
salaries they earn, unlike
in the U.S. and Europe, where
many developers join opensource
projects for recogntion,
even if there are no monetary
benefi ts, Raman said.
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