On Thursday 15 Jan 2009 9:30:17 am Shuveb Hussain wrote: > > recognition. Or, if I can dare to be even more optimistic, probably just > > a big, crazy enough goal will do :). > > Vamsee, as I understand, good software takes a lot of time to write. > Writing good software during "free time" is an incredibly difficult > proposition. For many important open source projects, the contributions > come from people who are trying to satisfy customers or release cycles with > open source software and get paid in the process by companies like RedHat > and IBM. The end result is that there is good quality open source software > available that is done on-the-job. For example, the most significant > contributors to the kernel are corporates.
I am constantly amazed at the amount of time people have free to write software - good software. Makes me wonder when these guys sleep (if they sleep). I am mostly a watcher of django and wxPython and the python community in general. Most of the developers have full time jobs - fortunately for them the jobs usually involve the open source projects they are contributing to, so their free time development work also complements their full time job work. And we have quite a few sleepless ones in India too - like Gopal from Yahoo! who does overtime work in Yahoo! and finds time for quality work in other projects. So people contributing in their free time is viable. But to what are they going to contribute? Even if the govt uses/develops open source for e-governance, the very nature of govt is to keep it secret and bar outside contributions. To date, barring a few minor things released by NRC-FOSS no government (or university or scientific institute in India has released anything as open source) - so even if free time developers are available, they have nothing to code on. The other option is to develop open source egovernance software and get the governments to use it. This is also a no-go, because government is bound by the tender system of purchase of software - and open source software does not fit in here. The only exception I have seen is Sahana - and the adoption of that by various governments is mainly due to the backing of IBM. -- regards KG http://lawgon.livejournal.com _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [email protected] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
