

 A Business case for Indian offshoring to deploy its “bench” towards FOSS - sandGorgon
http://sandeep.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/a-business-case-for-infosys-to-deploy-its-bench-towards-foss/
An open letter to several of India's IT offshoring companies, who are suffering the problem of too much idle manpower to utilize this lean period to contribute towards Free and Open Source Software and in the process gather free PR and Marketing, as well as expose their employees to excellent mentorship.
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dont
Talking about the talent that is sitting on these (very) long benches...

First, lets look at how Microsoft structures its business in India. Even the
mighty Microsoft follows a stratified talent pool system. They have 2
companies / teams here. The one that builds their products is called Microsoft
R&D and the people there are _GOOD_. Whereas all their global internal IT
systems needs are supported by Microsoft IT Services, which is staffed by
simpler developers who are not good enough to contribute to products, but can
cut all the HTML needed as well as make all the CURD applications that the
business operations need.

Indian IT companies are no different, they have a small cadre of excellent
developers, who form the core of their teams, and are very busy -- even now.
The rest of the millions are poor developers, not algorithmically sound, but
can make simple CURD applications.

Its this second layer that fills up the benches. And they are not going to be
valuable contributors to any of the projects you've picked -- (unless of
course you want coded an Add/Update form on the project's website ;)

If you look at the biggest revenue earners for Indian IT you'll realise its
this kind of internal CURD applications. Why should an Indian IT company hire
super smart developers, when it makes more by hiring (_and billing for_) many
warm bodies who'll hand code stuff because they are not smart enough to create
their own frameworks?

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manish
IBM has its own business interests to contribute to FOSS, it would be
interesting to know what interest FOSS could be for companies like Infosys.
Open source contribution requires dedicated interest and a sense of community,
which cannot be developed as a temporary option to work on while on bench. The
people who might have already worked on FOSS stuff might be able to make some
useful contribution, working on new stuff as a temporary option are unlikely
to produce useful results

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known
I suggested this to my company chairman in 2001. I got a nice appreciation
letter from the chairman. Actually nothing really happened after that.

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braindead_in
Good point. Never occurred to me. Doh.

I used to work for TCS at the start of my career. During those dot com bust
days saw a lot of my colleagues working on internal projects. Open source was
not a big draw those days.

Guess the FOSS community in India should take this up. Would be a good place
to start.

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statictype
Expecting them to be able to work on llvm and MySql is... highly optimistic.

~~~
sandGorgon
Every project needs developers _and_ testers. Contributing to projects may
take different avenues and opens up opportunities to climb higher on the
development foodchain as their experience matures.

