On 11-Dec-06, at 9:13 AM, Devdas Bhagat wrote:
Depends on what you are refering to as "global FOSS scenery".
I see two big communities in India: students and the industry.
there are three communities in the world contributing to foss - students, employees in industry and the independent entrepreneur. And you will be surprised to see how large a chunk of the community is from the third category. Most of these make a living from writing foss code - and a surprising number of them release the source to their customers. And they are very enthusiastic in contributing back to the community too. Also a very large chunk of them are from non-IT backgrounds. The problem with people from IT backgrounds is that they are afraid that if FOSS becomes mainstream, they would lose their jobs. So they think of it as a time-pass or hobby. I once half jokingly said that the development of FOSS in India is too important to leave in the hands of IT professionals - there is a lot of truth in it.