Bill Thompson on Open Source in India

Seems like there’s a lot of talk about open source software in regards to development these days.
The BBC’s Bill Thompson has an interesting story on open source software in India: BBC NEWS | Technology | India lays down ‘open’ challenge
Among other things, he touches on the isolation of Indian coders. There are Indian special interest groups, coders are doing much more than simply localising existing software and there is a lot of government support, but there is a lack of project that are really focused on solving Indian problems. This seems like it could be a sort of chicken-or-the-egg question similar to the “who gets ICT first, student or the teacher?” I mention in a previous post. Especially when we consider that open source software relies on the voluntary feedback of real users to identify problems. Maybe the issue is that they need more users rather than government support…