Nirmalya asks: “why there is hardly any Indian contribution of worth a real mention, in any of the successful Open Source technologies?”
I have wondered about this too. I don’t have a good answer.
An OSS Activity Study from July 2005 ranked India poorly. More recently, about six months back, John Ribeiro wrote an InfoWorld article, “India stays cool to open source”, where he suggested that…
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.
Are things looking up now? Jaya Kumar has a fairly optimistic update from FOSS.IN/2006 held in Bangalore in Nov’06. He sees the emergence of local role model in Suparna Bhattacharya, increased support from companies and improved broadband penetration as good omens.
But even Jay Kumar feels that “there is still a long way to go and significant improvements needed in the depth and quality of involvement before the local community can start to be satisfied.”
What do you think are the reasons behind the tepid embrace of Open Source in India?
I think it is not correct to compare software engineers in India with the software engineers in the developed world.
In India, people get into IT/software for the money, prestige, societal pressures. There is nothing wrong with this. In developed world, if your objective is money making, you would choose a career as a lawyer, investment banker or a doctor. Your motivations are to amass the most proprietary knowledge and skills thereby increasing your billing rate. Whereas, you end up in software (or basic sciences or engineering) if you are an unloved geek in high school.
BTW, the ‘lack of contribution from India’ is made for many other fields including basic sciences but I suspect reasons are different there and it is a separate topic.
In a nutshell, the contribution to open source is a labor of love and it is unlikely that the current generation of India’s software engineers (who are primarily looking for a hot career) will be motivated to contribute.
Follow up to my Infoworld article quoted above, there is some activity in the area of open source in the research and academic community, including the IITs and C-DAC. But for the most part it is still fringe. As you may have read in my other reports, ELCOT in Tamil Nadu and the Kerala education ministry are also taking a serious look at open source.
I am inclined to agree with Ravi Aranke that Indian software engineers are in that first phase when they are meeting their basic monetary commitments. Open source as a labour of love is still a long way off.
To make a serious contribution to an open source project, one needs to be working on it for significant amounts of time. The software engineers in India are on a lookout for the next hot technology to work on. They want the breadth, not the depth. Staying on on a single open source project (or a company) for a number of years could (wrongly) imply poor adaptability or employability and bring immense peer pressure to “move on”.
I’ve seen the previous comments and I’d like to take a contrarian look. I feel India is not doing so bad given the circumstances:
- Up until recently buying a PC cost serious money. A developer machine needs some serious capacity and this is getting affordable.
- Bandwidth is still hard to come by thought its getting better. Everything you need to download now is 100MB and you need a fat pipe.
- To be active in open source you need an attitude and you need good communication skills to be counted. The open source geeks can certainly articulate well. The folks here are getting there.
- And one needs time. With most software engineers working for measure by the hour billable services firms there isn’t the opportunity to go work on open source
- And our universities suck in terms of infrastructure. Do the IITs have WiFi now in their hostels?
- And as the previous commenters have mentioned, there are social issues to consider as to why we don’t get the swagger in our typical engineer and we really need that to survive in the open source world and be noticed.
I’ve seen FOSS.in and I’ve talked to a few dedicated OS committers here. The talent is there, the attitude is creeping in and the infrastructure is getting better. We really need to fix our Universities and we need more product startups. And we’ll see India shining!
BTW, There’s really nothing wrong in desiring to make money, gobs of money. Just that we need the realization that it won’t come easy, there are no shortcuts and the bar is high.
I don’t believe the lack of wide-spread FOSS contributions from India is because all software producers are locked into profit-driven ventures. India is largely, though not exclusively, a gift economy. I doubt if FOSS contributions will ever suffer for want of people. Most discussions I hear around FOSS discussions are around “how?” rather than “why?”.
The real reasons lie elsewhere. Some of the best FOSS projects of the last two decades came from individuals who had an itch to scratch; not from companies. FOSS contributions from India is not broad-based to the extent seen in western nations because the enabling structures like affordable computing and communication networks (especially broadband), that many westerners take for granted, are not in place across the nation yet. Daily networked computing is not commonplace in most cities and towns.
Notebook computers, that can survive hours of power outages, dropped below Rs. 30k only last year (still 16% higher than street prices in Singapore). Again, it is only last year that consumer broadband services were introduced in the main metros. It is yet to penetrate into second-tier cities and towns. While ISPs have been around for sometime now, they still interconnect through international gateways leading to latencies in several hundreds of milliseconds. National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) promises to inter-connect ISPs and lower latencies to tolerable levels by the end of this year (hope!).
Once computing and communications become available and affordable across the nation, contributions from this part of the continent is sure to skyrocket.
Thanks for a great set of comments so far. Cheap bandwidth and notebooks will certainly help. But let’s not forget that mainstream vendors like IBM, HP, Intel, and Nokia played a key role in growing the Open Source ecosystem in the US. They invested $2 billion in open-source software between 1995 and 2005 (according to this HBS report).
So the question for me is: where is the commercial impetus going to come from in India? It’s probably not going to come from the IT Services firms. Product companies don’t really exist right now. So, if at all it’s going to come, it will be from VC backed startups. They are anyway investing big time in open sources right now. This raises the next question: what kind of India-out venture-backed open-source startups are we likely to see? Any thoughts?
Couple of comments on ‘where the commercial impetus’ will come from:
- The infrastructure space (Operating system, middleware, databases) in open source already has been occupied and increasingly getting attention from big boys like Oracle. Note Oracle’s recent announcements about providing support for Red Hat linux and MySQL.
- The niches are opening higher up in the stack; in applications space.
- IMO, there are opportunities for a services company specifically focusing on its domain niche (CRM, ERP, BI, …) coupled with open source products to build a compelling offering.
Open source is an ‘orbit changer’ in this game as it offers advantages not available to a closed-source services company. I list below few:
- The product cost is very low (or even zero, in many cases) if you have the capabilities to build the product from sources and service it.
- The service company is not destined to remain just a VAR or SI forever. Over time, by participating in the community you could influence and perhaps, significantly own, the product direction itself - classic moving up the value chain strategy.
- The company brand is around the ‘key contributors’ it could attract and/or cultivate. Each contributor (who are more of a free agent than traditional employee) builds his/her own reputation in the community and thereby attracts business. This should reduce the marketing costs significantly.
I have few ideas on how such a company should be structured (more on the lines of a legal or accounting partenership firm). If anybody is interested in discussing further, drop me a line ravikiranaranke _AT_ yahoo
Regards,
Ravi
formerly with Red Hat and now thinking about all of this
Ravi is onto something here when he suggests a model where “Each contributor (who are more of a free agent than traditional employee) builds his/her own reputation in the community and thereby attracts business. This should reduce the marketing costs significantly. I have few ideas on how such a company should be structured (more on the lines of a legal or accounting partenership firm).”
This organization model is becoming more common. I have interacted with a organization called Success Across Borders. Its a self-organizing network of intercultural consultants who come together to provide, as they described it, “the right blend of backgrounds — industry, national, language and technical—to serve the needs of clients across the globe”.
Another example is Niti Bhan’s Jugaad, which describes itself “as a loosely linked alliance of designers, a dream team, that can offer servinces across continents - Africa, South America and South Asia”.
I just happened to come across this very interesting and thoughtful discussion. I am an avid lover of open source software and in fact use more of that than any commercial software.
Here are some of my viewpoints as to why Open source embrace is Tepid in India.
The very word that I feel is jagging the young Indian software guys mi9nd (be he a college student or a corporate setup) is “FREE” or “OPEN”. The image created by the commercials and the various other advertisers in India about the word FREE is that FREE means to just pick up something and not pay anything for it. Now this intimidates the mind of the young engineer .. Imagine him thinking that he puts in days and nights creating something and then people just pick it up and walk away and forget him !!. Well what needs to be emphasized here is that the word FREE as is used in the context of any open source software means that the consumer NEED NOT pay to have a look at the design of the application and change it to suite it’s needs. However the designer of any open source software can SELL the software to the consumer.
What needs to be emphasized here is that the word FREE– stands for Free flow of Knowledge and the word OPEN stands for Openess/Readiness to evolve to the needs of the customer
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