Gautam John wrote:
Last month, when Sun Microsystems announced a $1 million grant for
innovative open source projects at the Free and Open Source Software
conference in Bangalore, it wasn't the sort of news that makes major
headlines. Larger amounts have been committed before. IBM, for
instance, is spending $1.2 million to set up an open source Software
Resource Center in partnership with the Center for Development of
Advanced Computing in Pune and the Indian Institute of Technology in
Mumbai. And this is only one of IBM's India projects. Sun has spent
almost $2 billion supporting open source initiatives across the globe.
Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun, notes, however, that
"[India] is where so much innovation is happening." The award is meant
to catalyze projects in six Sun-created environments -- OpenSolaris,
GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice and OpenSparc. While the
competition is not limited to open-source programmers in India, Phipps
said he was announcing the award in India "because that's where I
expect the greatest open source community growth to come from in the
near future."
<snip>
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4250#
Corporate-sponsored contests aside, in terms of OpenSolaris
community-building, India is ahead of the other emerging markets for
this one reason: the people there get the concept of contribution and
participation and they are taking action. They are not talking. They are
doing. Some other regions are not that far behind, but India leads.
China is incredibly interesting for us, and most recently Brazil and
Venezuela and Eastern Europe are spinning up with some creative ideas
and events. We are still a very small community and primarily based in
the US around Sun. But, things are starting to diversify a bit, and
little communities within communities are forming all over the place.
I'm convinced India will turn more than a few heads in the US (actually,
they already have, to be honest). It's very cool. I'm looking forward to
spending more time there ... :)
Jim
--
Jim Grisanzio http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris
