FOSS.IN: A report

Posted Dec 9, 2005 20:18 UTC (Fri) by kravi (guest, #34351)
In reply to: FOSS.IN: A report by jwb
Parent article: FOSS.IN: A report

You seem to be too harsh on Wipro employees. Or maybe I feel that
way because I am one of them :)

You have made three points in your comment:
1. Wipro uses open source software.
2. Wipro employees ask stupid/annoying questions which amount to
"do my work for me".
3. Wipro does not contribute to open source software.

Apparently, the combination of these factors has made you angry..

I will try to give an insider's view of these things. Note that I
am NOT representing Wipro here nor am I defending it. Just stating
a few facts. Most of what I say here applies to almost all major
Indian IT companies.

1. Using open source software: Wipro (and most major Indian IT companies)
is a software services company, which mostly means "we do as we are told".
The decision to use open source software is mostly taken by the client
organization.

2. Bad questions happen - all the time and on all mailing lists.
(Similar annoying questions appear on our internal mailing lists as
well and I have pointed several people to the "How to ask questions
the smart way" document by ESR). Singling out a question by one Wipro
employee and saying this is typical is being grossly unfair.
Many of us use our personal mail-ids when interacting on mailing
lists precisely because we don't want the ugly confidentiality notice
attached to our mails. So please don't assume that the kind of question
you pointed out is typical of all Wipro employees.
(And the bit about stealing someone's job: Does anyone seriously believe
that decisions like outsourcing are based on who knows Perl better??)

3. Just like clients ask Wipro to use open source software, they
sometimes ask that we contribute code to open source projects as
well. This has happened many times and keeps happening. But you'll
never find out that Wipro is involved because all such contributions
are routed through the client organization.
This doesn't mean that Wipro consciously encourages such contribution.
It is just incidental.

Software services companies like Wipro and Infosys don't have a
business model that requires them to be a part of the open source
community. It is the clients who determine the involvement of
such companies in the open source community. Is that a good situation
to be in? Definitely not. But that's the way things are at the
moment..

Surprisingly, even in some of the big IT companies with a well-publicized
"open source strategy", there are groups which don't understand open
source based business models. I have had the frustrating experience of
working with one such group. There was a mortal fear of releasing any
code because the competition would then benefit from our engineering
efforts. The fact that the competition should first have the hardware
to make use of our code was lost on the managers.