[IP] How India is saving capitalism [salon.com article]
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2004 16:33:39 +0530
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: How India is saving capitalism [salon.com article]
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/04/01/collabnet/print.html
How India is saving capitalism For one Silicon Valley company, hiring
Indian programmers wasn't about greed, it was about survival. A special
report from Chennai, globalization's ground zero.
Editor's note: This is the first of a series of reports on the offshoring
of white-collar jobs, reported on location in India.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
April 1, 2004 | CHENNAI, India -- In an auditorium on the Chennai campus
of the Indian Institute of Technology, Brian Behlendorf is stumping before
200 engineering students. The pony-tailed founder and CTO of the Silicon
Valley start-up CollabNet is here, ostensibly, to talk about open-source
software. The event has been organized by the Indian Linux Users
Group-Chennai;
[...]
"Outsourcing is a sensitive topic in the U.S. for political reasons,"
Behlendorf says. "But the open-source community has been doing outsourcing
since the beginning." Programs like Apache and Linux and many others, he
argues, were developed by thousands of volunteers from around the globe --
an example of massively outsourced labor. In a sense, the move by Western
corporations to outsource programming operations to developing nations
isn't just about cutting costs, it's about adopting a new software
development model.
[...]
and about the audience -
The men, who make up the majority, are dressed in button-down oxfords and
belted khakis, the women in flowing salwar kameez. There's only a
smattering of geeky T-shirts: "2001 Welcome to Linux: It's now safe to
turn on your computer," reads one.
[I was the guy wearing that t-shirt, as it happens - it was designed by my
friends at ILUG Hyderabad - http://www.ilug-hyd.org.in - for a 10th
anniversary of linux party in 2001]
srs
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