open source is a side effect

I would like to ask an interesting question: what if open source software is simply a side effect? When I look at successful projects what I see is not people who are out to create software that’s open source. Instead what I see people who have two passions: technology and working together to solve a problem. If a bunch of programmers don’t work at the same company or school, how can they collaborate? How do they work together? I think that the so-called “best practices” of open source software is the result of that. Open source is the expression of the creative process that is software development between individuals.

I’ve been in India for a few days now, battling jet lag and having some very interesting meetings with people in government and private industry. The meetings I’ve been having all seem to have a running theme: how do we take all of the incredible talent that India has to offer and channel it into open source? If nothing else, the sheer number of people who are involved in the IT industry in India should mean that they should be leaders in the open source community, right? Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I think that most people who are in the open source world would tell you that compared to the number of people in the IT industry in India that the number of contributors in open source that are Indian is disproportionally low. So the question has been: why?

Onto another seemingly unrelated topic: programmers in the US. In the US technologists, programmers and the like are actually looked down on. Look at the words used to describe them: Geek. Nerd. Dork. Socially inept. Never gets girls. Etc. I would say that for the people who do get involved in the technology industry in the US often do so because they love it, and they are good at it. They are drawn to it because they have a passion for it.

Back to India for a second. Another constant theme in my meetings this week has been descriptions of people who are in IT schools in India. For students who are in schools to which we suggest that they get involved in open source software in India often ask “how will doing work in open source software help me get a job?” Very often they will do that task, submit a patch, fix a problem, and then vanish. There’s little ownership of that code, which is a basic tenant of working in open source. I believe that this is because the primary motivation in a lot of IT work in India is not love of technology, but because work in IT is a clear method for upward social mobility. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it means that the incentives for working in an open source community aren’t there.

So back to my original question: assuming that open source software is a side effect of technology-loving people who want to work together, how do we turn this into a strategy for building open source leaders in India? The current methods include trying to get early students involved in projects by breaking tasks down into pieces that they can easily digest. But I suspect that this doesn’t take into effect the right motives that create leaders in open source. I think instead of taking the approach of trying to get as many people involved as possible, and hoping that open source benefits from them, we instead take the approach of building a program that selects those people who are involved because they clearly love technology and want to work together. A mentorship program that identifies people with passion as its focus would probably draw out the right people who want to work in open source and hopefully turn them into leaders as they move through school.

I know that these guys exist in India. My conversations with Atul Chitnis, RKVS Raman, and various other folks here in India bear this out. But I think that everyone gets quickly bogged down in the numbers of people instead of trying to target those folks who do this for the love and the passion of technology. Those are the people we need to find in India, because they are the future leaders in open source. The question should not be about “how many” so much as “who.”