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70,000 copies of Linux hit India
Tom writes "Just saw this on Linux Weekly News:
A magazine in India (called "PC Quest") apparently just
carried RedHat 5.2++ on their March cover CD. Claims the
focus of the issue is corporate (whatever that means), and
that the articles would be available on their website RSN.
Apparently they do it every year - accompanying press release
claims quarter of a million Linux CDs so far."
Perhaps AOL should now create a Linux version to pack with these CDs!
I thought India was already heavily into Linux? Hmm, perhaps my sources are mistaken...
Great for the people who can't afford crappy software by an old company name Microsoft.
"Apparently they do it every year..."
Yep. And apparently you weren't paying attention LAST year when we were all talking about essentially same story.
I know India from what I understand is a poor place...but I do know this. Alot of there people come to America just to get a good computer job. This is great. Now the people up there do not have the need to spend a ton of money on Winblows 98 when they have a better OS in there hands! Hope this make Linux grow even more.
Natas
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Grab our new song God! It was made in Linux with Slab!!!
I think many people in China also use linux.but how about the developers ?
So many Indians, so few CDs
--- A Proud Indian Linux User
The www.pcquest.com website uses IIS and .asp pages. Of course, my Apache install reports it's IIS, and can do .asps, too (but I doubt their webmaster would be that crazy).
Your thinking Mexico, You racist Dolt! Just because we alre dark skinned and 3rd world nations doesnt mean you should be confusing us!
Uh remember Linux is a muli user OS. For every install made there can be numerous USERS.
topic says it all
yoyoyo grrlz
A PC at home is a luxury in India, even for software
guys.Also, most people try to enhance their resume so as to get a better paying job in the USA
rather than spend time developing free software. Nevertheless, there was a lot of guys who used the previous
years' CDs to find the joyof Linux, in their office
machines. Usually it is all Slackware, and UMSDOS to avoid partitioning. And Slackware is a greatsystem
to learn! Once when I went to Europe, I bought the french magazine Dream and Debian that came with it. First time I saw a easy Linux installation!
Anyway, hopefully people get net connection and home PCs in an affordable way there.. Another good thing is that lot of
university projects are now being done on Linux. If there is sufficient coordination, those students would be
able to contribute a good quantum of code..
Other than that not much of a sudden increase in num. of developers from India.
OpenBSD is getting coverage in Japan, China and Taiwan recently. Look at the subdirs...
:) For what I can tell, there is many using the various BSD-Lite OS, Linux and unique other OS of many asian country. For instance in Korea, China, Vietnam and Japan there is many developers using FreeBSD. Checkout the ports subdir:
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/
http://www.openbsd.org/anoncvs.html
developers
http://www.freebsd.org/ports
http://www.jp.freebsd.org/
http://www2.kr.freebsd.org/
Yippee..India is GREAT!! :) We do this every year. At one time the same magazine PC QUEST released OS2/Warp around the time Windows 95 was coming out.
The Linux articles on its web can be found here
I keep seeing the same "7 to 10 millions Linux users world-wide" repeated like a mantra in the press. Yeah, I know it's an guessimate since registering is not a requirement. However, I've been seeing this guessimate for the passed few years. If the PHBs see that same 7 to 10 million number over and over, it gives the impression Linux is not really growing. We all know that is definitely not true. :-)
:-)
We could come up with a number based on Linux CDs sold by each distribution; that would be closer to reality; one that reflects Linux's true growth.
Even the CDs sold is inaccurate. For example, I used my RH 5.2 Linux CD to install Linux on 4 different machines. 3 of the systems have more than 1 user. My Debian distro went on 2 other machines. 2 CDs, 6 systems, about 30 users overall.
So can we up that 7 to 10 million number occasionally, please?
This isn't the first time PC Quest has released
Linux CDs, more like the third or fourth. And they
also bundle all the updates plus other cool stuff
like KDE. *Very* clued bunch out there.
In a country where Internet access is way too
expensive (unless you're in the university/corporate world), and nothing like
Cheapbytes/LSL, PC Quest CDs are probably the most
widely used medium for Linux installation.
PC Quest also has regular features on installing/
using Linux - the most pro-Linux magazine
I've seen here.
Go PC Quest !
Yeah, and apparently YOU didn't ralize how many of us didn't even know about Linux this time last year!
India is a very vast country with umpteen number
of languages and a long history. Basically Indians
are adaptable to anything new. So Linux definitely
gets in to the techies mind. Thanks to PC Quest.
Without their Linux CD's it would have been impossible for so many of us to get a taste of Linux and fall in love with it. First time it was
Slackware with kernel 1.2, then Slackware 2.0,
Redhat 5.0 and now RH.5.2. It was from this CD's
I did my first Linux installtion. And that was a
real thrilling experience.
As mentioned, India has lot of languages which are live and thriving. If only Linux can talk in
all those languages. I hope soon we will have a
GNU project to make Linux speak all those Indian
Languages. That'll be real cultural revolution.
A movement (FSF) started by an American, prefected by a Finnish guy, nice gui's added by Germans and
Mexicans, talking Japanese,Korean, Chinease and
all those Indian Languages. What is there that
we cannot achieve if we all join hands together!
This is the path towards world domination. A free
world without bombs and missiles. A world with full of love and peace!!!!!
I actually know quite a few people in India with PCs at home these days. True, you're not going to find anything close to villages with 100bT LANs and OC48s running around. But in the larger metropolitan areas, there are now often computers in the houses of doctors, higher engineers, and other professionals. And they often let their neighbors use it, just like with watching television.
I think the networking for something like that would actually outweigh the hardware costs you're quoting.
Another idea is that decreased costs could increase turnover in heavy industry/design applications. This could allow employees to bring older machines home or move them to schools. I know back in 1985, HAL (a government aircraft company) was using HP 9000s running UNIX, so there's already some degree of an installed base.
It's not really disproportioniate if you consider two things. There are a lot of people in India. On average, there is a much greater cultural emphasis on education & advanced degrees. But yeah, I've heard people say that our CS department is mostly Jews and Indians. And it wasn't a racist remark, just a casual observation that's pretty much true.
You ever notice how the race that gets offended by racism is always the one who brings it up in the first place? Think about it.
He was not being racist, he was making a mistake. You on the other hand made no mistake, it was your goal to attach racist attributes to his mistake in order to make your beloved racism flourish. After all without racism, assholes like you would have nothing to talk about.
We wish you every sucess and happiness in your quest to extend the international language support of freed software.
Cheers.
Pedophile music...think I'll skip that one
Great. Educate Indians so that they can become computer literate, come to the US and take our jobs.
Before we know it, they'll be shutting down Burger King.
What are they going to run the CDs on anyway?? Do they have electroicity in India yet?
Actually their webserver is hosted by one in US who would only provide services on NT using IIS. Anyway it is good that www.linux-india.org is hosted on a Linux box. You can see a dicussion thread on this in the archives of linux-india mailing list. [link http://members.home.net/adsharma/linux-india-1.htm l]
Actually you never know. Because of the poor communication infrastructure in countries like South Asia and China, the outside world does not know about proper numbers. I have an experience of a linux server in one of the remote sites in Central India where they were using it for internal mail, shell account and web hosting purposes from PCQ Linux CD. Still the upper mgmt did not know then nor did the outside world.
There may be similar cases in many parts of the world.
Why do you say Linux isn't pretty?
Some posters questioned the lack of any free software contribution from India. This is more due to lack of affordable Internet connectivity than anything else.
This guy is a complete ignorant A'OL. Does anybody
on earth have electroicity. But we do have electricity and much more. Don't be afraid of your
jobs . you cannot handle them anyway with this kind of ignorance. You need help from others like us
Phage is from some greek word meaning EAT, not love. So a pedophage would be someone who eats kids not fucks them. Just about as equally disgusting. But get your perversions right before you flame.
The march issue of the Australian PC-WORLD magazine has got an additional CD included which has RED HAT 5.2 on it with the subtitle 'See what the hype is all about'. Just for the record.
You guys can have Linux, but can I have one of your lovely Indian girls? There is nothing sexier than an Indian woman -- drooooolll!!
Gotta get me some of dat!
This kind of racism cannot be tolerated especially by us. If we are to claim to be intellectually superior to the average dolts out there.
"Great. Educate Indians so that they can become computer literate, come to the US and take our jobs."
May the best programmer win... if you think you can't compete, study harder.
the only flaw I see in this is that not all Indians are comeing here to compete equaly.
It is always the best, most educated, wealthiest and most dedicated that will make it to the
US. I have nothing agenst it I have some good friends that are Indian. But it is hard enough to compete with the common wealth of the US but to add the "best" from other contrys just makes it worse.
70,000 copies hit India. I wonder what kind of sound that would make? Would it me the clanging of a dropped CD, ot the thwap of a magazine plopped onto a tabletop. Or maybe the whir of HD's spinning up, preparing for new installations.
I'd like this to suceed as well, but as an earlier poster pointed out, the inherent dishonenty and double-dealing in Indian society (based on scratch my back and I'll scratch yours), will prevent Linux from every being popular. A corrupt socity such as this is inimically based to inefficient, technically inelegant solutions - which automatically disqualifies linux.
BTW, I'm Indian, if you're wondering.........
Asshole
so first of all, like, will those linux distribs
be able to write/read devanagari or whatever?
not without a bit of fiddling!
what if indian programmers use hindi comments in their 'super duper program that puts all other programs to shame'? guess i will be SOL!
What's the potential number of Linux developers in India? Oodles and oodles!
There was an article in Australian Personal Computer a few months back which stated that after the USA, India is the second largest producer of software. The article doesn't mention which is the preferred OS, but I'd assume Linux (and perhaps pirate copies of Unix variants) would be very widely used in universities.
can we trust you?
Could be either, really. The Ancient Greek word pais (paid- in most cases other than the nominative) means 'child', and has evolved to our root ped, as in pedophile, pediatrician. But the English ped also means 'foot' (quadruped, pedal) and, as you said, and comes from the Latin for foot, which in turn was originally the Greek pod (arthropod, podiatrist). So 'pedophagia' could be either foot- or child-consuming? Or both! Mmmmm!
man, I thought people in my school were immature, I guess thats beat.
O! Lord, forgive him, for he doesn't know
what he is saying.
There've been a few other major magazines in India carrying popular linux issues. I daresay there are plenty ways other than confusion w/ Mexico he could have gotten the impression.
What's the problem if he were to confuse you with Mexico? Do you find it offensive? I don't think he was confusing India with Mexico, but perhaps at that moment he remembered that a 3rd world country was heavy in Linux and though it was India. At least you should be happy that people think of India when thinking of fast adoption of technology. If there is somebody racist, it is you for so quickly assaulting a person you don't even know. What do you think? That everybody is after you or your people? That just because someone make a mistake or don't know enough about your nation that person is an enemy of your race? That is just plain stupid.
Besides, your claim that everybody in India is dark skinned is racist at least. Just ask an Indian from Kashmir. What about Aishwarya Rai? Last time I saw a picture of here, she looked pretty much light skinned. I have many, many friends from India, and I'm glad to say that none of them have such stupid erratic behavior as yours. That gives me comfort to know that you are just a behavioral exception rather than the norm.
Also, why shouldn't he confuse us? Why should someone be an international erudite? Just so that he can please your arrogance? I can ask you a 100 questions about Latin America, and I'm pretty sure you would get a few confused. Would that makes you a racist? By the same token, you could ask me a 100 questions about India and it's very likely I'll confuse some. Would that make me a racist? Think before you bark. Then you will learn to talk. Then you will deserve to be noticed and respected.
Ladies and gentlemen, behold that the bastard has spoken. This half-sentient, half dog half pig breed, good for nothing abomination of nature has spoken like this before in this site. Whenever someone mentions a 3rd world country, the bastard drools and let his narrow minded crap escape its stinking mouth. This arrogant half-human doesn't even knows how to write, yet it has the audacity to call others illiterate. The bastard is so stupid and moronic that he has all the reasons to fear others. He cannot possibly compete with merits alone.
Yes, you stupid bastard, they have "electroicity", I mean electricity. They cannot afford "electroicity", the same low energy fuel that power your brain cells. This dog is afraid of educated Indians since, next to them, he is nothing but shit. What else are you going to say, pig? When are you going to learn that you are nothing but an extint animal, uncapable to adapt, uncapable to learn and interact with other humans? Either shut up and do what is needed to compete is this brave new world or die! There is no going back. This world is for the taking for those bold enough, intelligent enough, competitive enough. You have no room in this world anymore. Go back to the technological mud pile where you crawled from. Serve humanity by becoming fertilizer. I'm tired to see shit like you bashing on 3rd world countries. If you are so f*cking good and us so f*cking low and illiterate, what are you afraid of? Make fun of Indians all you want. In the end, if they didn't have "electroicity", they would be ingenious enough to use the crack of your ass as a cd-player.
Why did you single out one dept? Most of the
depts are running linux from 1994! (And in CS,
from 1992.)
I live in Pune, India - a pretty big city. I was surprised to find that Redhat CD's were 2nd best selling CD's from the list prepared by a leading CD selling store.
:-)
I am not talking of Software CD's, but CD's such as IBM Encyclopedia (topper), many games etc. i.e. the ones which are sold to general public.
The list is compiled by a leading Music House which also sells CD's. (And they don't give away free
With opening of ISP's there is a big debate in India that Linux should be used for ISP. You can search for stories in http://www.rediff.com/computer/comphome.htm, a Indian portal site.
Does linux support all the Indian dialects or is it English only?
---
hells yea.. and with a possible messed up law that :P).. ...but anyway.. whats hampering them is the lack of motivation to do anything for free.. the culture and new changes in india.. have made it a dog eat dog world.. where everyone follows the rule of "Do onto others before they do onto you".. basically taking the time out to develop something for the love of it.. like a lot of kernel hackers do... maybe motivating to some developers of india.. but it's not a practical solution yet.. when the whole country has more problems than it count.. people need to see the bottom line.. which is that the country is poor it needs money.. a computer revolution that makes everything free. is great.. but food and basic neccessities.. are a little more important. sad but true.. so umm lets all chip in and start a kickass isp in india.. giving people cheap stable internet axxess.not the current RS 10000 for 600 hours /month..
US immigration wants to pass(not allowing foreign developers in)(sorry i don't know much about this law, my cousin is from india, and he got lucky they gave him a visa.. it's getting harder and harder for people from india or any other country to come in for jobs in the US.. india hurts a little more because of the (not so recent) nukes and all... now all we need is a cheaper way to access the internet in india and we could definately have
a nice bunch of kernel hackers/developers from india.. but poverty and the need to meet basic necessities will hinder that process.. indians are great programmers (just ask me i'm an indian
well i doubt anyone here will doubt that india has produced some great programmers
Prove there are more than 7-10 million users, and maybe the media will pick up on it. Until then, they will continue to use that number as truth. Besides, how do you know that number wasn't inflated back then, and it's actually true now? Oh, and site sources please, not idle speculation.
I'm just wandering if they include the sources in a 2nd CDs with the magazine, or they offer everybody who wants the sources a way to aquire them, just as the GPL states.
It is good to have more people taking a look at Linux and other GNU and free software, but is not good to forget the license who made it possible in the first place.
Linux has gained enough momentum that everybody wants to jump in, but they will have to take it all the way just as it comes, and not forget half of the deal.
everybody (including me) will have to be careful reminding everybody else about it.
GPL does require you to do one of the followng 3 things:
1.- include the sources
2.- include a written offer, valid for 3 years to provide anybody who wants the sources for the cost of no more than the cost of putting the sources in the appropiate media
3.- only in the case of a free distribution, to accompany the offer you recieved to distribute the source code (I'm not shure if including a CD in a magazine as a value added ment to sell more magazines is considered a free distribution).
I think it's not valid to give a CD with binarys and not offering also a CD with the sources.
BUT this is not the most important part of all, what I think is they may confuse and miss the point of the free software and the only ones who will loose are the people in India, cause they will miss the point and be not well-informed.
At least I hope the magazine includes a printed copy of the GPL inside its pages.
What's the potential number of Linux developers
in India? Oodles and oodles!
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
and in addition to many users... I think that each CD will probably be installed on numerous machines...
.
Is is just me or is there a disproportionate number of kick-ass programmers coming out of India? Seems the CS grad schools here in the U.S. are full of them, and most of them are really good! Must be something in the water ;^)
.
"Great. Educate Indians so that they can become computer literate, come to the US and take our jobs."
;^P
May the best programmer win... if you think you can't compete, study harder.
"Before we know it, they'll be shutting down Burger King."
Huh? Ohhhh.... the cow thing. Very funny
"What are they going to run the CDs on anyway?? Do they have electroicity in India yet?"
Electroicity? What's that? I know they've had electricity for quite some time... unless they developed nuclear weapons by candlelight.
Hmmmm, maybe you should be worried... a complete idiot like you would never compete...
.
Well, to your average Joe-Windows-User upgrading by recompiling your kernel, editing flat text files to configure your system, and using obscure commands like "ps aux" or "chmod" are not very elegant solutions... and they're right. Aside from the elegance of simplicity and modularity, UNIX as a whole has a very arcane and "hacked together" feel (well, it has been hacked together)... just ask someone who used to code on those old LISP machines... UNIX sucks. ;^)
The thing is it's simple, robust, modular, well tested and, once you get used to it, very straightforward.
Sure UNIX sucks, but all OSes do. Linux just sucks less
As far as eye candy, well, my Window Maker desktop never fails to awe and impress Windows users... but that's not what I meant by "pretty".
.
Isn't RedHat's yearly study due out this month? I while back I heard that they had put out a suggested preliminary figure of 12 million and said that the final estimate could be as high as 15 million. "Sizing the Linux Market" is a paper on the redhat site about the 1997 year end figure.
India does have a potential to contribute lot of Linux deveopers in future. However, unlike in the US where internet connection costs $20 month for unlimited time, internet connection in India is a big deal. The biggest hindrance to the adoption of Linux is actually the govt of India with its monopoly on telecom. I heard things have changed somewhat for the better. But I would be surprised if affordability of internet is anywhere near US.
Ramana
true...if you work it out :
suggest every copy is used, and installed once. That still makes it one linux user out of 12,000 indians, or something close to that
And it's not just the tech. Universities running Linux either - the network at the National Law School in Bangalore runs it (Slackware, I think, though that may have changed to RH 5.2 now)
-- God is silent. Now if we can only get Man to shut up.
The potential for computers in India is amazing, but the extreme poverty there really puts a limit on this. Being an Indian myself (I am still a citizen of India), I really want this technology to come to India. But if you want any kind of computer penetration, you need to do it very very cheaply. I estimate that at most, a computer sold in india can cost RS10000 to be a viable choice for middle-high income houses and small-medium-large businesses. But RS10000 is a little more than $200. The $50 for MS operating systems is a helluva lot of money back there. A cheapbytes $2 CD is the best solution. Furthermore, assuming a $50 for a basic 14" old monitor, you'd need to fit MB, HD, CPU, MEM, VID, and everything else into $150.
If you manage to build a system like that, pretty much the only use for them would be in businesses. You could probably set up a nice little PostGreSQL database for them to keep track of finances, inventory, and lookup. But then, the other major problem is, considering the amount of underhand dealing and wheeling that happens, most people DONT WANT clean records for their businesses, especially when it comes to big businesses.
Of course, you could probably build a cheap system with about 300MB HD with linux/gcc on it and sell it as a tool which families of children in CompSci can buy to help their kids along, but I am doubtful about the prospect of this actually selling anything.
-Laxative - just some rambling
What would be cool would be client-server situation. A moderately priced (US$300 ? remember no monitor) server with some ultra-cheap clients. Just dumb terminals. Then a community could invest in a community computer. For that amount of money the server could have a decent sized hard disk and a more than adquate processor. Nascent developers could start working with emacs & gcc +gdb and everyone could email & chat with each other. Maybe a dial up connection to an ISP could allow the box to act as a web server and allow people in the community to keep in contact with their family and friends abroad.
Just a thought
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Anyone interested in Linux in India should checkout Linux India. They have a couple of mailing lists that get some decent traffic.
It is my personal opinion that, India will catch up Linux development in the near future. Don't expect it at US levels due to poverty. However, spreading Linux into universities with internet connections will result an exponential gowth of users, therefore lot of contributions to Free/OSS. Targeting universities with direct internet connections is the easy path. In the third world, M$ can't compete with Linux by any means because Linux is free on top of technical supiriority. So, when colleges in India realize that they get a technically supirior OS for nothing, Linux will spread like a wild fire weeding out micros~1. However, without easy internet access Indian contribution to Free/OSS will be minimal. Let's hope for the best.
I am from India, and i have been using linux personally since 4 years. The magazine "PC quest" has distributed more than 60-70,000 copies of linux on its monthly free CD rom, almost every year since 1995. First they carried slackware, last year they carried RedHat 5.0. They cover story in last april was oriented towards an individual user. They had great, brief articles about configuring everything on Redhat.
Also in india, u can buy a real cheap assembled PC, with all the latest technology, and Linux Pre-installed, since the last 3 years. This is basically 'cause in india people are still not totally mindlessly caught into the mindset of "M$ = computers". And everyone realizes linux offers a great value for money.
Linuxghoul
Sigura Non Grata
Well, last year they tested redhat linux b4 they put it on their CD, and actually ran their WHOLE corporate intranet on an old 486, shifting the whole load from a set of pentiums running NT. they reported a continous uptime of about 2 months, and it was still up and running when the story ran. They usually had uptimes of a week with NT. Anyone installing Apache should probably read thru their writeup in their last years issue.
Sigura Non Grata
linux currently does not seem to support all dialects. Emacs had support for devnagari though. And besides, most people in india study english more than they study their own regional dialects. That partly explains why their is no "indian version" of windows, like there is for china and japan.
Sigura Non Grata
I agree with you mostly, but i think linux awareness wise, india is doing pretty well, mainly due to the efforts of PCQ. I am from iit delhi, and i know one of the PC labs with about 30-40 P-IIs, where Big Bill donated a number of copies of NT(when he visted india 2 years back), have now been converted to Redhat, cause no one wanted to work on NT. Also the main Computer center has as many linux PCs as NT, and the redhat ones are the only ones which are in usable conditions. Most of the comp. center is as it is UNIX(solaris,AIX) based.
Sigura Non Grata
It will be so! lets just keep the faith!
Amen.
Linux: The real peoples OS. For the people, from the people, by the people.
Sigura Non Grata
well, they actually do not modify any of the source code, so the source code is available for everyone to use. It (i think) is not distributed on the CD to save space. I think the license seeks to prevent people from modifying the source and then not opensourcing it. It does NOT require u to always include source with all distros, as long as all the source is still accessible on the net, as it is, in this case, from the redhat site.
Sigura Non Grata
buddy, all u managed to prove was ur utter ignorance of anything beyond your threshhold, and obviously, some one so puny minded as you has serious reasons to be scared of indians. US is a great country, and was made great by the influx of the best talent from the whole world. Did you by any chance know that you would most probably never suffer from an Y2K related trouble 'cause of those very "computer illetrate" people? I agree my country is poor(what do you expect when its been sucked dry for two hundred years by capitalist leeches?). But believe me, we do have electricity(of course, we don't have anything like eletroicity), we make by far the cheapest supercomputers on this planet, and we are not in debt to the UN. Silicon valley is full of indians, who have contributed significantly to the development of infotech. We launch our own satellites, and need only 5 tests to develop our nukes(needed for our national defence, like urs are for u), not the 12K-odd u guys conducted.
Grow up kid. There is a whole new world out there.
All i can do is pity u.
Sigura Non Grata
I think that they are meaning Pedis as in latin for foot. The Foot Eaters. You know like putting one's foot in their mouth (i.e. people who make comments without thinking first) :)
But maybe I'm wrong
Not really "new" news. The adoption rate of Linux in China, India and a lot of the developing countries is VERY high. Linux is replacing SCO which was once the most pirated OS, as the OS of choice by many institutions who cannot pay up the US$$$$ for the software.
Actually we don't have enough "Electroicity" to run spell checkers.. causes too much of an overload on the national power grids. We are unfortunately forced to learn how to spell :-)
Sorry, I just find a lot of irony in posts about other people stealing jobs, from folks who can't really err... spell.
Linux has been a strong presence in indian academia. Way back in 1995, when I entered IIT Bombay for my masters in communications, the whole electrical engg. dept was running on Linux, complete with gateways, bridges, mailhosts, webservers virtually *everything* running on linux. The biggest problem has been the available bandwidth. The net is so *slow* that you can't share your work with anyone, even within india. Transfer rates for ftp/http are pathetic - 10-20 bytes/sec. Unless this improves its really hard for average (those not in software industry) indians to contribute effectively.
Well, the kernel source *are* always there. They don't distribute the whole SRPM directory, it doesn't fit one CD.
That I think is quite OK because as said above the y don't change any sources/packages and whatever they add as extra (they had some scripts/progs to simplify integration with netware, for creating DNS forward and reverse mapping files etc), they give the source for it - a la RedHat.. Kudos to PCQuest. If it was not for them, Linux in India would have remained confined to small groups in indian academia - like the one in electrical dept. at IIT Mumbai - and the rest of the vast indian population at the mercy of the M$ monopoly.
One point that may not have occurred to you: To the extent that developing countries develop, and gain in wealth and technical capabilities and infrastructure, they become more than just competitors for American jobs. They also become customers for American products and services. Think about it.