India stays cool to open source

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.

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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.