India stays cool to open source

By John Ribeiro, IDG News Service, 06/29/06

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India, once seen as fertile ground for open-source software, has yet to embrace the development model in the way many hoped it would.

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 open-source 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, said Vinay Deshpande, chairman of Encore Software Ltd., 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, said Muthu Krishnan, head of the Indian operation of CollabNet Inc., 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 first 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 Inc., who asked not to be quoted by name.

As a result, probably less than 2 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), part of the government's Center for Development of Advanced Computing. 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.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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