It is very heartening to see that 101 Indian students made it to the Google Summer of Code 2009 program. Hopefully, this and other forays into the world of open-source development by desi techies will shake off the code-coolie stereotype that has come to be associated with the majority of the tribe. Many have bemoaned the lack of Indian contribution to the open source cause and tried to understand this phenomenon.
As Dr Deepak Pathak, chair professor KReSIT, IIT Bombay puts it, Indians have been "net-takers" rather than "net-givers" to open-source and knowledge generation in general. He goes on to add that culturally, desis are not likely to contribute to any significant cause unless they stand to gain something from it as well. In this article written by Ryan Norbauer on his experience working with Indian developers, the author offers his perspective on disproportionate lack of contribution to open-source by desi developers :
Indian employers don’t allow their developers to blog or make contributions to open-source, for fear of losing them to competitors who might contact them directly. And if an employer doesn’t permit his or her employees to contribute back to the platforms they work with on a daily basis, it means they’re probably more obsessed with billing every hour possible than in building up their team and technology.
Having worked with many Indian offshore teams over the years, I have seen the pattern Norbauer writes about repeated in almost every firm. Very likely the US based company using the services of the offshore vendor allowed cost to be the single overriding factor. The author advices against this :
... try to find the most expensive and accomplished provider possible. When you’re already saving money working with an offshore (or at least partly offshore) team, it’s very easy to get greedy and go for whoever bids the lowest rate. But if a team promises they’re going to give you great work for what sounds like an insanely cheap price (and, believe me, these folks aren’t hard to find), red flags should go up immediately; they probably have no idea what they’re doing. It took me a few bad experiences early on to learn this lesson, but it’s one I’ll never forget.
With the start-up culture gathering more and more steam in India, the younger generation of software developers are likely to enjoy a lot more freedom in terms of their career options than their predecessors did. With a good idea and the technical chops to bring it to fruition, a young person is no longer beholden to their "sweat-shop" style employer who will work them insanely hard to bill the hours without giving employees the opportunity to grow their skills and knowledge base. Contributing to open-source is likely to become much more common place when the strait jacket constraints of conventional employment are relaxed or better yet removed.
