Google recently had a summer of code competition, which basically was about students working with a few opensource projects to improve them. The working has finished and now Google has come out with a map of the locations of people who worked in the projects.
What interested me is this ... India has only 2 guys working on the code.
Now... this starts me thinking. IF India is being touted as the IT outsourcing hub, why is the contribution so low ?
One train of thought that I have is mostly people in India need to be told what to do. The societal pressures are so that we really don't end up think for ourselves. And I think a prime example of this is the summer of code. Most people in colleges will not do it cause they are not told to do it - rather they would have fun during the holidays. And this I think translates to the work also being done in India. There are too few development projects even in most big companies, and is also seen by the low numbers of startups.
Another train of thought is that nowdays most people have windows desktops, and the internet connection if available is for downloading mp3s and videos. Most people are proud of having these , even if they are pirated. In fact piracy has become the norm here - people whom I know have quite a lot of money still go out and get the pirated software ( most of them don't even realize they are pirating. They only know that they are getting something cheaper ). As a result, very few people use Linux.
But, in a college environment Linux will be available. In a college environment, peers will tell you about the 'summer of code'. I don't think that profs will have much idea of it as most seem to work in their own world. But this is distressing. People just don't seem to want to use their minds constructively.
Taking a look at the map furnished by Google, China has a much better contribution than India, and if this trent continues, India had better watch out, or we will see ofshoring going to China in such a big way , that India may lose out. India needs more geeks and nerds.
This thing about just 2 entires from India in summer or code from google ... i think in India, as a student, there are couple of limitations,
ReplyDelete1. There is not passion and confidence to go ahead and do something that one feels passionate about, rather i wud say whether one understands one passion is also of question. I think a student in India by class 12th is very much linked to family and tied up and Not independent to understand oneself or to know oneself. So as u say, if one is told then one does something else just leave it and enjoy whatever time one has with oneself.
2. i think would be the infrastructure constraint. The schools and colleges should have the infra but we all know what utilisation of that infra is there.
~V