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You seem to be quite an authority,.. closed in on Indian Techies ..
Appreciate that ... but some times its good to have an open mind ..
http://www.linux-india.org/

really?

Yeah, check out this ILUG (as they call them) for Mumbai. VERY active!

I completely agree with you. I hail from India. Almost all my friends back home in India are doing CS as a major and i am sorry to say that Linux/*NIX has hardly made any inroads.

Dude, you've been moving around the wrong circles. You'll find the good guys here. Yeah, the chapters listed are geographically weird. Really don't think the "Vizag" chapter is different from the "Visakhapatnam" one; you see, Vizag:Visakhapatnam::LA:Los Angeles.

A better reference is probably the Linux Counter. For instance, there are more registered Linux users in India than in a country that most Indians love to hate, but is still smaller than a country they should really hate, fear and compete. :-D

(The comparison is really a joke to tease patriotic Indians. No offense intended to Pakistanis or Chinese)

I completely agree with you. I hail from India. Almost all my friends back home in India are doing CS as a major and i am sorry to say that Linux/*NIX has hardly made any inroads.

Dude, you've been moving around the wrong circles. You'll find the good guys here. Yeah, the chapters listed are geographically weird. Really don't think the "Vizag" chapter is different from the "Visakhapatnam" one; you see, Vizag:Visakhapatnam::LA:Los Angeles.

A better reference is probably the Linux Counter. For instance, there are more registered Linux users in India than in a country that most Indians love to hate, but is still smaller than a country they should really hate, fear and compete. :-D

(The comparison is really a joke to tease patriotic Indians. No offense intended to Pakistanis or Chinese)

The Linux Answering Machine HOWTO is not exactly what you're looking for, but surely a good start.

Links:
http://www.littlewhitedog.com/reviews_other_00011. asp
http://lists.linux-india.org/lists/linux-delhi/200 105/msg00179.html
or the handy mini-howto
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Linux+NT-Loader .html

bm :)-~

Good comments, especially the RMS-as-diplomat irony. But we don't need to worry about source code forking into other languages. India is a programming powerhouse, as you said, but all the Indian programmers are fluent in English. Everyone in India who graduates from high school speaks basic to decent English, and every college grad speaks good to excellent English. I spent half a year in India in '93 and the Indian Edition of PC Magazine (in English) was very popular. At that time DOS was starting to give way to Windows 3.1, and Unix was well established.

English is one of 2 national languages in India. There are about 32 "official Indian languages," spoken in the various states and regions of India. This makes it necessary for professionals in India to communicate and practice their professions in English. Otherwise they could not avoid the problems of communicating across linguistic regions. Also, using English connects Indian professionals to the world community in a way that Hindi (India's other national language) would not. That is why Indian medical journals are all written in English.

China doesn't have the history of English colonialism that India does, but English is the language of technology and it is the language that connects China to the world. China also has many regional languages. If anything, proficiency in English will increase in China, as it is everywhere else.

So there is little reason to think that Chinese and Indian coders will fork the code into local languages, since those languages isolate people from the other people that they need to be able to communicate with, like other programmers. The only solution is to use a regional language to talk with friends or family, and use English for the professions and technology.

Aside from these language issues, China and India have economic issues that make free software *much* more attractive for financial reasons than it is in the affluent west. As much as you might hate Microsoft, you probably don't suffer financially from the few hundred dollars a year it takes to stay current with MS products. In India and China it is a very different story -- one hundred dollars is a lot of money for an average citizen. Also, the cost of labor in these countries is much lower relative to the cost of technology (hardware and software) than it is in the west. This also supports the proliferation of open source software, because the software is free and you pay for service, which is less expensive due to low labor costs.

All in all, few people in the OS community appreciate the impact that OS software can have in these two countries. China is the most populous country in the world (1.25 billion), and India is number two (1.0 billion). As open source software explodes in these countries, the installed base of Linux will become huge. These countries have a lot of poverty, but are far more technologically sophisticated than you might expect. The average young people in these countries are reasonably well educated and hungry for technology.

So regardless of how much market share Microsoft can maintain in the US, Linux could easily dominate the market in India and China within five years. The open software genie is out of the bottle in every country, and it might behave differently in some countries than it does in the US. Do not underestimate the resentment that many people in developing counties feel towards the Microsoft Expensive-Western-Technology-Empire. It reminds them of colonialism. They are very proud of their countries and they want industrial and technological autonomy. OS software gives them that possibility.

For information on Linux in India, a good place to start is Linux-India.org.

Anyone interested in Linux in India should checkout Linux India. They have a couple of mailing lists that get some decent traffic.