FOSS.IN: A report

Posted Dec 9, 2005 5:41 UTC (Fri) by notagarwal (guest, #34425) [Link]

Another angle to the contribution problem is again related to the social structure. As is clearly evident from the various posts, comapnies(I will be audacious enough to say 95% of them) will pay you becasue they can make money out of what you do. Contribution to FOSS does not add in anyway to their bottom line. So they will make sure for the time you are employed with them (40 hrs a week) you do what they want and I think it is a contractual obligation.

This leaves FOSS contribution only as a hobby which I have to do in my spare time and that I have very little (you can call me escapist and I would say I am owning my responsibilities). I spend about 11 hours out of home(9 hours in office + 1.5 to 2 hours in commute) and about 7 hours for sleep. That leaves me with 6 hours to do the rest of the things like brush, cook, eat, take care of the family (and this means extended family...my children, my parents and not so uncommon relatives who stay with you when they are traveling). Things aren't that organized here in India and it takes time to do everything. This morning a stop at my bank to deposit a certain sum of cash took me 25 minutes.

Now you aks about the saturday, and I try to use that but with the fast paced movement of the open source community, working 1 day a week would hardly help. Most of the day will be spent just catching up on what happened during that week when you were not logged on.

I tell this from my own experience as I have failed multiple attempts to contribute back to the community. I have worked on UNIX/Linux kernel all my life. I was using the PCQ Linux on my desktop way back in 1996 and I am a greate supporter of FOSS. But within the framework of being an employee, a son, a father, a husband, a friend, a good neighbour and a FOSS contributer, I think FOSS comes lot lower.

But not to give up heart :-) I do try to spend my saturday visiting colleges, encouraging the students to try their hand at coding and not to mention FOSS is the one that gives them all the freedom.

Sorry about the long post and very personal narration. I thought it would give better insight if I posted the implementation details rather than an Architecture :-)