India stays cool to open source

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, 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, 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.

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,” said Prakash Advani, a co-founder 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 “official” languages and many more that are used besides. Although Microsoft Corp. 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 said.

Indian developers are starting to get involved in open-source development as an outlet for their creativity, and because some have a passion for the development model, Encore’s Deshpande said. 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 said.

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 Inc., encourage developers to participate in open-source 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.

The Indian IT industry employed 878,000 staff at the end of March, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies.

“Whether we develop proprietary or open-source software is usually a decision taken in conjunction with the customer,” said Deepak Khosla, senior vice president of marketing at Patni Computer Systems Ltd., an outsourcing company in Mumbai.

A number of outsourcing companies use open-source tools, but they do not contribute to their development, CollabNet’s Krishnan 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 open-source projects for recognition, even if there are no monetary benefits, Raman said.

CollabNet prefers to hire developers with open-source project experience, and encourages them to continue contributing, but the number of job applicants who have contributed to open-source projects is less than 1 percent, according to Krishnan.

“All of them refer to open source in their resumes, but that would usually mean that they have used Perl or Python, and not that they have contributed back to the open-source community,” he said.

If Indian developers get more involved in open-source projects, they could do wonders for the country and the open-source community at large, according to Advani, of IndLinux.org. For now, however, the Indian developer is concerned with earning his “bread and butter,” he said.

“They can only start thinking of making free contributions to the open-source community and society at large after they ensure that their basic material requirements are met,” Advani said.