I had the honor to be invited as a speaker to FOSS.IN, India's premier open source conference, which takes place this weekend in Bangalore. Atul Chitnis and his team brought together this exiting event in a country where open source is still not as much a part of the software culture as it is in the Western world or in China.
It's mostly India's developers themselves who yet have to find their way into open source. They are surely heavy users of open source products, but their contributions are rather minimal, compared to the size of the local industry. I discussed several reasons with Indians, and among the answers we found were social issues, the money-orientation of developers, the grib of Microsoft, expecially in the educational sector, and the importance of official certificates and degrees for hiring (rather than an assessment of coding qualities). All these gave little incentive to engage, but most people feel that the movement is gathering steam now.
At the conference, I was putting forward some provocative thoughts around open source and business in a talk titled "How we fix the Software Industry with Open Source". I met a couple of entrepreneurs who believe, like myself, that open source gives individuals a great tool to pursue their dream to bring new, useful products to market, where there was less opportunity a few years ago due to the high cost of building a global software business.
We also conducted a BOF in a Ghandi-style tent session (pictures), with the help of Andrew Cowie, which was a great opportunity to touch base with local open source community members. Shridar Venkatraman from Retailwave, a local db4o customer in India, shared why he used a thick client solution with db4o for his SaaS platform solution for small businesses spread out in remote Indian areas: Since connection cannot be guaranteed, they needed a local database cache, and db4o does exactly that.
Kalpana Shah from Red Herring already wrote about the event and quoted me.