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70,000 copies of Linux hit India 81

Posted by CmdrTaco from the flood-the-country dept.
Tom writes "Just saw this on Linux Weekly News: A magazine in India (called "PC Quest") apparently just carried RedHat 5.2++ on their March cover CD. Claims the focus of the issue is corporate (whatever that means), and that the articles would be available on their website RSN. Apparently they do it every year - accompanying press release claims quarter of a million Linux CDs so far."
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70,000 copies of Linux hit India More

70,000 copies of Linux hit India

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  • There've been a few other major magazines in India carrying popular linux issues. I daresay there are plenty ways other than confusion w/ Mexico he could have gotten the impression.
  • What's the problem if he were to confuse you with Mexico? Do you find it offensive? I don't think he was confusing India with Mexico, but perhaps at that moment he remembered that a 3rd world country was heavy in Linux and though it was India. At least you should be happy that people think of India when thinking of fast adoption of technology. If there is somebody racist, it is you for so quickly assaulting a person you don't even know. What do you think? That everybody is after you or your people? That just because someone make a mistake or don't know enough about your nation that person is an enemy of your race? That is just plain stupid.

    Besides, your claim that everybody in India is dark skinned is racist at least. Just ask an Indian from Kashmir. What about Aishwarya Rai? Last time I saw a picture of here, she looked pretty much light skinned. I have many, many friends from India, and I'm glad to say that none of them have such stupid erratic behavior as yours. That gives me comfort to know that you are just a behavioral exception rather than the norm.

    Also, why shouldn't he confuse us? Why should someone be an international erudite? Just so that he can please your arrogance? I can ask you a 100 questions about Latin America, and I'm pretty sure you would get a few confused. Would that makes you a racist? By the same token, you could ask me a 100 questions about India and it's very likely I'll confuse some. Would that make me a racist? Think before you bark. Then you will learn to talk. Then you will deserve to be noticed and respected.
  • Ladies and gentlemen, behold that the bastard has spoken. This half-sentient, half dog half pig breed, good for nothing abomination of nature has spoken like this before in this site. Whenever someone mentions a 3rd world country, the bastard drools and let his narrow minded crap escape its stinking mouth. This arrogant half-human doesn't even knows how to write, yet it has the audacity to call others illiterate. The bastard is so stupid and moronic that he has all the reasons to fear others. He cannot possibly compete with merits alone.

    Yes, you stupid bastard, they have "electroicity", I mean electricity. They cannot afford "electroicity", the same low energy fuel that power your brain cells. This dog is afraid of educated Indians since, next to them, he is nothing but shit. What else are you going to say, pig? When are you going to learn that you are nothing but an extint animal, uncapable to adapt, uncapable to learn and interact with other humans? Either shut up and do what is needed to compete is this brave new world or die! There is no going back. This world is for the taking for those bold enough, intelligent enough, competitive enough. You have no room in this world anymore. Go back to the technological mud pile where you crawled from. Serve humanity by becoming fertilizer. I'm tired to see shit like you bashing on 3rd world countries. If you are so f*cking good and us so f*cking low and illiterate, what are you afraid of? Make fun of Indians all you want. In the end, if they didn't have "electroicity", they would be ingenious enough to use the crack of your ass as a cd-player.
  • Why did you single out one dept? Most of the
    depts are running linux from 1994! (And in CS,
    from 1992.)

  • I live in Pune, India - a pretty big city. I was surprised to find that Redhat CD's were 2nd best selling CD's from the list prepared by a leading CD selling store.

    I am not talking of Software CD's, but CD's such as IBM Encyclopedia (topper), many games etc. i.e. the ones which are sold to general public.

    The list is compiled by a leading Music House which also sells CD's. (And they don't give away free :-)

    With opening of ISP's there is a big debate in India that Linux should be used for ISP. You can search for stories in http://www.rediff.com/computer/comphome.htm, a Indian portal site.
  • Does linux support all the Indian dialects or is it English only?
  • hells yea.. and with a possible messed up law that
    US immigration wants to pass(not allowing foreign developers in)(sorry i don't know much about this law, my cousin is from india, and he got lucky they gave him a visa.. it's getting harder and harder for people from india or any other country to come in for jobs in the US.. india hurts a little more because of the (not so recent) nukes and all... now all we need is a cheaper way to access the internet in india and we could definately have
    a nice bunch of kernel hackers/developers from india.. but poverty and the need to meet basic necessities will hinder that process.. indians are great programmers (just ask me i'm an indian :P)..
    well i doubt anyone here will doubt that india has produced some great programmers ...but anyway.. whats hampering them is the lack of motivation to do anything for free.. the culture and new changes in india.. have made it a dog eat dog world.. where everyone follows the rule of "Do onto others before they do onto you".. basically taking the time out to develop something for the love of it.. like a lot of kernel hackers do... maybe motivating to some developers of india.. but it's not a practical solution yet.. when the whole country has more problems than it count.. people need to see the bottom line.. which is that the country is poor it needs money.. a computer revolution that makes everything free. is great.. but food and basic neccessities.. are a little more important. sad but true.. so umm lets all chip in and start a kickass isp in india.. giving people cheap stable internet axxess.not the current RS 10000 for 600 hours /month..
  • Prove there are more than 7-10 million users, and maybe the media will pick up on it. Until then, they will continue to use that number as truth. Besides, how do you know that number wasn't inflated back then, and it's actually true now? Oh, and site sources please, not idle speculation.
  • I'm just wandering if they include the sources in a 2nd CDs with the magazine, or they offer everybody who wants the sources a way to aquire them, just as the GPL states.

    It is good to have more people taking a look at Linux and other GNU and free software, but is not good to forget the license who made it possible in the first place.

    Linux has gained enough momentum that everybody wants to jump in, but they will have to take it all the way just as it comes, and not forget half of the deal.

    everybody (including me) will have to be careful reminding everybody else about it.
  • GPL does require you to do one of the followng 3 things:

    1.- include the sources

    2.- include a written offer, valid for 3 years to provide anybody who wants the sources for the cost of no more than the cost of putting the sources in the appropiate media

    3.- only in the case of a free distribution, to accompany the offer you recieved to distribute the source code (I'm not shure if including a CD in a magazine as a value added ment to sell more magazines is considered a free distribution).

    I think it's not valid to give a CD with binarys and not offering also a CD with the sources.

    BUT this is not the most important part of all, what I think is they may confuse and miss the point of the free software and the only ones who will loose are the people in India, cause they will miss the point and be not well-informed.

    At least I hope the magazine includes a printed copy of the GPL inside its pages.
  • What's the potential number of Linux developers
    in India? Oodles and oodles!
    Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
  • and in addition to many users... I think that each CD will probably be installed on numerous machines...
    .
  • Is is just me or is there a disproportionate number of kick-ass programmers coming out of India? Seems the CS grad schools here in the U.S. are full of them, and most of them are really good! Must be something in the water ;^)
    .
  • "Great. Educate Indians so that they can become computer literate, come to the US and take our jobs."
    May the best programmer win... if you think you can't compete, study harder.

    "Before we know it, they'll be shutting down Burger King."
    Huh? Ohhhh.... the cow thing. Very funny ;^P

    "What are they going to run the CDs on anyway?? Do they have electroicity in India yet?"
    Electroicity? What's that? I know they've had electricity for quite some time... unless they developed nuclear weapons by candlelight.

    Hmmmm, maybe you should be worried... a complete idiot like you would never compete...
    .
  • Well, to your average Joe-Windows-User upgrading by recompiling your kernel, editing flat text files to configure your system, and using obscure commands like "ps aux" or "chmod" are not very elegant solutions... and they're right. Aside from the elegance of simplicity and modularity, UNIX as a whole has a very arcane and "hacked together" feel (well, it has been hacked together)... just ask someone who used to code on those old LISP machines... UNIX sucks.
    The thing is it's simple, robust, modular, well tested and, once you get used to it, very straightforward.
    Sure UNIX sucks, but all OSes do. Linux just sucks less ;^)
    As far as eye candy, well, my Window Maker desktop never fails to awe and impress Windows users... but that's not what I meant by "pretty".
    .
  • Isn't RedHat's yearly study due out this month? I while back I heard that they had put out a suggested preliminary figure of 12 million and said that the final estimate could be as high as 15 million. "Sizing the Linux Market" is a paper on the redhat site about the 1997 year end figure.
  • India does have a potential to contribute lot of Linux deveopers in future. However, unlike in the US where internet connection costs $20 month for unlimited time, internet connection in India is a big deal. The biggest hindrance to the adoption of Linux is actually the govt of India with its monopoly on telecom. I heard things have changed somewhat for the better. But I would be surprised if affordability of internet is anywhere near US.

    Ramana

  • true...if you work it out :
    suggest every copy is used, and installed once. That still makes it one linux user out of 12,000 indians, or something close to that
  • And it's not just the tech. Universities running Linux either - the network at the National Law School in Bangalore runs it (Slackware, I think, though that may have changed to RH 5.2 now)
  • The potential for computers in India is amazing, but the extreme poverty there really puts a limit on this. Being an Indian myself (I am still a citizen of India), I really want this technology to come to India. But if you want any kind of computer penetration, you need to do it very very cheaply. I estimate that at most, a computer sold in india can cost RS10000 to be a viable choice for middle-high income houses and small-medium-large businesses. But RS10000 is a little more than $200. The $50 for MS operating systems is a helluva lot of money back there. A cheapbytes $2 CD is the best solution. Furthermore, assuming a $50 for a basic 14" old monitor, you'd need to fit MB, HD, CPU, MEM, VID, and everything else into $150.

    If you manage to build a system like that, pretty much the only use for them would be in businesses. You could probably set up a nice little PostGreSQL database for them to keep track of finances, inventory, and lookup. But then, the other major problem is, considering the amount of underhand dealing and wheeling that happens, most people DONT WANT clean records for their businesses, especially when it comes to big businesses.

    Of course, you could probably build a cheap system with about 300MB HD with linux/gcc on it and sell it as a tool which families of children in CompSci can buy to help their kids along, but I am doubtful about the prospect of this actually selling anything.

    -Laxative - just some rambling
  • What would be cool would be client-server situation. A moderately priced (US$300 ? remember no monitor) server with some ultra-cheap clients. Just dumb terminals. Then a community could invest in a community computer. For that amount of money the server could have a decent sized hard disk and a more than adquate processor. Nascent developers could start working with emacs & gcc +gdb and everyone could email & chat with each other. Maybe a dial up connection to an ISP could allow the box to act as a web server and allow people in the community to keep in contact with their family and friends abroad.

    Just a thought
  • Anyone interested in Linux in India should checkout Linux India [linux-india.org]. They have a couple of mailing lists that get some decent traffic.
  • It is my personal opinion that, India will catch up Linux development in the near future. Don't expect it at US levels due to poverty. However, spreading Linux into universities with internet connections will result an exponential gowth of users, therefore lot of contributions to Free/OSS. Targeting universities with direct internet connections is the easy path. In the third world, M$ can't compete with Linux by any means because Linux is free on top of technical supiriority. So, when colleges in India realize that they get a technically supirior OS for nothing, Linux will spread like a wild fire weeding out micros~1. However, without easy internet access Indian contribution to Free/OSS will be minimal. Let's hope for the best.
  • I am from India, and i have been using linux personally since 4 years. The magazine "PC quest" has distributed more than 60-70,000 copies of linux on its monthly free CD rom, almost every year since 1995. First they carried slackware, last year they carried RedHat 5.0. They cover story in last april was oriented towards an individual user. They had great, brief articles about configuring everything on Redhat.

    Also in india, u can buy a real cheap assembled PC, with all the latest technology, and Linux Pre-installed, since the last 3 years. This is basically 'cause in india people are still not totally mindlessly caught into the mindset of "M$ = computers". And everyone realizes linux offers a great value for money.

    Linuxghoul
  • Well, last year they tested redhat linux b4 they put it on their CD, and actually ran their WHOLE corporate intranet on an old 486, shifting the whole load from a set of pentiums running NT. they reported a continous uptime of about 2 months, and it was still up and running when the story ran. They usually had uptimes of a week with NT. Anyone installing Apache should probably read thru their writeup in their last years issue.
  • linux currently does not seem to support all dialects. Emacs had support for devnagari though. And besides, most people in india study english more than they study their own regional dialects. That partly explains why their is no "indian version" of windows, like there is for china and japan.
  • I agree with you mostly, but i think linux awareness wise, india is doing pretty well, mainly due to the efforts of PCQ. I am from iit delhi, and i know one of the PC labs with about 30-40 P-IIs, where Big Bill donated a number of copies of NT(when he visted india 2 years back), have now been converted to Redhat, cause no one wanted to work on NT. Also the main Computer center has as many linux PCs as NT, and the redhat ones are the only ones which are in usable conditions. Most of the comp. center is as it is UNIX(solaris,AIX) based.
  • It will be so! lets just keep the faith!
    Amen.

    Linux: The real peoples OS. For the people, from the people, by the people.
  • well, they actually do not modify any of the source code, so the source code is available for everyone to use. It (i think) is not distributed on the CD to save space. I think the license seeks to prevent people from modifying the source and then not opensourcing it. It does NOT require u to always include source with all distros, as long as all the source is still accessible on the net, as it is, in this case, from the redhat site.
  • buddy, all u managed to prove was ur utter ignorance of anything beyond your threshhold, and obviously, some one so puny minded as you has serious reasons to be scared of indians. US is a great country, and was made great by the influx of the best talent from the whole world. Did you by any chance know that you would most probably never suffer from an Y2K related trouble 'cause of those very "computer illetrate" people? I agree my country is poor(what do you expect when its been sucked dry for two hundred years by capitalist leeches?). But believe me, we do have electricity(of course, we don't have anything like eletroicity), we make by far the cheapest supercomputers on this planet, and we are not in debt to the UN. Silicon valley is full of indians, who have contributed significantly to the development of infotech. We launch our own satellites, and need only 5 tests to develop our nukes(needed for our national defence, like urs are for u), not the 12K-odd u guys conducted.

    Grow up kid. There is a whole new world out there.
    All i can do is pity u.
  • I think that they are meaning Pedis as in latin for foot. The Foot Eaters. You know like putting one's foot in their mouth (i.e. people who make comments without thinking first) :)

    But maybe I'm wrong
  • Not really "new" news. The adoption rate of Linux in China, India and a lot of the developing countries is VERY high. Linux is replacing SCO which was once the most pirated OS, as the OS of choice by many institutions who cannot pay up the US$$$$ for the software.
  • Actually we don't have enough "Electroicity" to run spell checkers.. causes too much of an overload on the national power grids. We are unfortunately forced to learn how to spell :-)

    Sorry, I just find a lot of irony in posts about other people stealing jobs, from folks who can't really err... spell.
  • Linux has been a strong presence in indian academia. Way back in 1995, when I entered IIT Bombay for my masters in communications, the whole electrical engg. dept was running on Linux, complete with gateways, bridges, mailhosts, webservers virtually *everything* running on linux. The biggest problem has been the available bandwidth. The net is so *slow* that you can't share your work with anyone, even within india. Transfer rates for ftp/http are pathetic - 10-20 bytes/sec. Unless this improves its really hard for average (those not in software industry) indians to contribute effectively.

  • Well, the kernel source *are* always there. They don't distribute the whole SRPM directory, it doesn't fit one CD.
    That I think is quite OK because as said above the y don't change any sources/packages and whatever they add as extra (they had some scripts/progs to simplify integration with netware, for creating DNS forward and reverse mapping files etc), they give the source for it - a la RedHat.. Kudos to PCQuest. If it was not for them, Linux in India would have remained confined to small groups in indian academia - like the one in electrical dept. at IIT Mumbai - and the rest of the vast indian population at the mercy of the M$ monopoly.
  • I won't even bother to comment on your prejudiced and arrogant attitude, except to reassure the Indians who frequent this forum that not all Americans are as stupid and narrow-minded as you are.

    One point that may not have occurred to you: To the extent that developing countries develop, and gain in wealth and technical capabilities and infrastructure, they become more than just competitors for American jobs. They also become customers for American products and services. Think about it.

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