Viraj's Weblog

Here is an interesting view of how many Indians educated in India think of free software. I myself am Indian but I was born and raised in the US. I agree with the article that the university systems in India probably do not encourage creativity, but rather focus on employment.

However I think for a person to be interested in free software, they have to have a certain mindset created very early, perhaps much before college. I think the reason I became interested in OSS was not because of school, in fact I did most 'hacking' outside of school. I saw the benefits of OSS and its results, because every bit of 'hacking' or learning I did was dependent on OSS. I needed to have Linux on my system to learn Unix. I needed GCC to learn C, etc. These tools were there and I didn't need to spend money to gain the knowledge on how to use them. I saw that in general OSS seemed to work better than closed source in many cases, and that I could get better support from one lone developer than an army of help desk personnel in a commercial product's support department.

I also worked in the computer science department as a sysadmin, and doing so forced me look for solutions to problems with little budget. It also allowed me to change software to work the way I needed it to. It's one thing to know that the source is there and you can change it, but it's different when you actually do change it. You become much more entwined in OSS, and you realize the true power of it. You realize that this could never have been done if you used a closed source product. All of this contributed to how much I value OSS.

For someone to gain interest in becoming an OSS developer, you need to see all of these things and realize that you want to be part of it as well.