The main reason for the growth of free s/w in india may be the large amount of advertisement and support for proprietery s/ given by local Computer centers and educational institutions. Away from big cities, (I don't know what are the current circumstances outside kerala), no computer institute tries to teach free s/w. Instead they give large amount of advertisement for Office,Vb, VC, ASP, Oracle etc. The reason is that the institutes wants profit and they think that they can get a high profit only through teaching MS products. They make general public feel that A computer means windows (What a funny idea isn't it?) Even i have some experience with some employees in some computerised environment unknowing about free s/w at all. There is the deficiency of good faculties as well. Even those people running Computer centeres (We can call them principals or centre heads of an eucational institution) unawre of the fact that there are free s/w available instead of what s/w they use. Also anybody has a comment about teaching programming in high school classes before the student understands what is a computer, what is word processing, what is a spread sheet? what is internet etc.. Our educational policy is to first teach programming and may of our schools are without proper facilities.. The student who sees the computer for the first time in his life starts learning programming in c++ and he is really confused (that was the case with me when i started programming some years back).. So i think its appropriate to teach some fundamentals and some lab sessions at least for 2-3 months.. Any opinion about it.. then plz write to me thank U