On 10/12/06 10:13 -0800, Shakthi Kannan wrote:
Hi,
My thoughts below:
--- ???????????????????????????|Praveen pravi.a@gmail.com wrote:
What are other reasons for not many Indians in the global FOSS scenery?
Depends on what you are refering to as "global FOSS scenery".
I see two big communities in India: students and the industry.
- Students in most institutions (exceptions are IITs,
IISc, NITs, et. al.) live in their own shell, without any exposure to the real world or the industry. So, they don't have the technical know-how or skills for any development, let alone FOSS development.
*Shrug*. Anyone who is interested can find out and learn. I know quite a few people who did. Including a whole bunch of people on this list.
It wasn't easy and it wasn't cheap. The payoff is rather high though.
- Lot of companies in the Indian IT industry use
FOSS. They service international clients from US, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Because they sign an NDA, they are not allowed to _name_ the clients. But, yes, there is tremendous contribution to FOSS, from an *industry* perspective.
Are they contributing code back in? Is the code good enough to actually go into version control? Or are they mere users? From what I see on most mailing lists, most Indians have no clue on how to research information, STFW, RTFM, and all that stuff. They merely ask for information on how to get things done, without showing that they have put in an effort in the first place.
Funnily, these questions tend to come from people at $BIGNAME Indian companies.
Can you point me to public codebases where the contribution to FOSS is happening? Particularly by people from the $BIGNAME Indian companies, instead of people employed by multinationals.
There is a _huge_ gap between academia and the industry (exceptions are IITs, IISc, NITs, et. al.), so the academia folks have absolutely no idea what the industry is doing. Industry is more focused on servicing international clients, for obvious reasons.
Academia isn't there as a mere stepping stone to a job. IMHO, academia doesn't cover enough theory for students.
People working in the industry also have a hectic schedule, sometimes working 7 days a week. So, it is very difficult for them to take time out, for their personal FOSS community contributions. There are exceptional people too.
No one says you *have* to work those schedules. Or get it written into your contract that you can put code and/or documentation into the foss world using company resources. These are contracts, not laws. You *can* negotiate.
Devdas Bhagat