chuck> In any event, it would be nice to hear what is actually going
chuck> on in India, rather than having us speculate on it.
Chuck,
I get about a dozen emails a year from someone in India who's set up a Linux or *BSD server or workstation, and wants some advice or help with something in particular (usually configuration of some especially tricky service, like DNS or NNTP or a tricky Sendmail or Postfix problem). There were, last time I looked a few years ago, 6 Linux User Groups situated in some of the larger cities in India.
<5 minutes pass...>
Rather than speculate from memory, I decided to do a bit of research. Of course, these are just Linux User Groups, but in my experience with these grassroots groups in the US, all kinds of free software, including the *BSD OSes are routinely discussed and taught:
India: 62 groups, including:
Andhra Pradesh: 5
Assam: 1
Bihar: 1
Goa: 3
Gujarat: 7
Haryana: 1
Karnataka: 9
Kerala: 3
Maharashtra: 10
Punjab: 1
Rajastahn: 2
Tamil Nadu: 2
Uttar Pradesh: 2
West Bengal: 1
Suffice it to say, there are lots of folks in India you could mail to find out how things are going vis-a-vis this subject. A perusal of http://www.linux-india.org/ is fairly enlightening too.
Some other interesting numbers:
Albania: 1 Argentina: 20 Bahamas: 2 Bangladesh: 5 Barbados: 1 Bolivia: 3 Brazil: 33 Chile: 3 China: 16
(in the geek fantasies of the free software world, China has long
featured centrally in the "we'll finally crush Microsoft" myth.) Colombia: 15 Cuba: 1 Ecuador: 3 Egypt: 6 El Salvador: 2 Gambia: 1 Guatemala: 1 Haiti: 1 Honduras: 2 Indonesia: 17 Iran: 3 Ivory Coast: 1 Jamaica: 1 Kazakhstan: 2 Kenya: 2 Kyrgyzstan: 1 Lebanon: 1 Libya: 1 Malaysia: 10 Mauritius: 1 Mexico: 14 Morocco: 1 Myanmar: 2 (which I seem to recall cut itself off from the Internet last year...) Nepal: 2 Nicaragua: 1 Panama: 2 Paraguay: 5 Peru: 6 Philippines: 6 South Africa: 9 Sri Lanka: 1 Uruguay: 3 Venezuela: 6 Vietnam: 1 Zambia: 1
Of course these groups are mostly full of relatively privileged people, primarily university studients, one might guess.
There's also a pretty active, last I heard, peace-corps-like program to take free software geeks to sub-saharan Africa to offer free training, installations, and so on.
At the risk of inflaming another round of computer madness on this list, I think free software makes a lot of sense in developing countries; it isn't the solution to all computing technical problems, but the low monetary barrier to entry has to be very attractive wherever $$ is tight.
Best, Kendall Clark