India and Open Source

Can Open Source help India?  Found this excellent article at Wharton Knowledge. discussing about how Open Source will impact Indian ecosystem.

Will India Become the New Vanguard of the Open Source Movement?

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.

In general, while many Startups and businesses across the world use open source, almost none of those applications they develop are open source. If all those people who say, Open source is the best, why don't they use open source for themselves? I tend to think, while many take advantage of Open source movement, none of them really believe in being open-source. Sometimes, it looks lot like a political game, though impacts of open source are quite positive beyond a doubt for most economies, to thrive.