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Open SourceAsia joins the league

For most populace, Asia is still considered to be a laggard when it comes to embracing of new technologies on the Internet. But according to Open Source vendors, this trend could well see a change in the near future. If they are to be believed, then Asia could well be in midst of a revolution which supports adoption of Open Source technology and the usage could well become very widespread in the next two-three years.

Arun Kumar, Director of Service at Red Hat said “Open Source has to be taken up broadly by both enterprises and governments as the first step”. The logic being uncomplicated that the usage by government institutions and large scale enterprises will increase the credibility quotient the same way as it happened in US. The main onus is on the developed technological communities in India which have to develop into a leader to contribute to the Open Source community.

The satisfying news is that Open Source users are on a small upsurge but a lot needs to be achieved yet. Another problem is the disinterest shown by Open Source providers resulting in continuous negligence of this section of the world. The solution to the problem lies with David Axmark, co founder of My SQL database. He said “Enterprise users requiring software customization specific to the region, are unable to depend on the developer ecosystem. Instead, these businesses will have to rely on global open source vendors to build and package those features into their products”.

India can well take examples from France for its immense input to the Open Source community and the support from its government to the entire industry in the form of tax incentives and free distribution of software was worth noticing. The three major things that India can learn from other countries from their contribution to Open Source are mass customer adoption, government support and high quality technical education.

For the above to happen, the creation of awareness among its web users needs to be very high. It is in actuality a tad difficult, because Linux and Open Source in Asia are less identified than the people in Europe and America. Another reason could be the wider reach of Microsoft as its competitor and seeing that the technical proficiency is less; people prefer using Windows as it is more user friendly.

So, the bottom line in the espousal of Open Source lies in the verity that individual users should also start moving away from proprietary software to Open Source. For this to ensue there should be a change in the mindset of the users. As soon as potential users realize the fact that consumers and developers both carve up the same value in the Open Source ecosystem, Asia will be able to contribute to the Open Source community with all its righteousness.

Praval, the author of this article is a freelance writer/blogger and evangelist. He writes reviews and stuff related to Cloud computing, Office 2.0, Startup ecosystem, Wordpress, Linux, Open Source Software, Life hacks and technology in general.