On Jan 14, 2008 5:54 AM, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Fri, 2008-01-11 at 14:01 +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: > > Then, there's this consistent pressure to earn, earn, earn .. join > > Cognizant, get married, have kids, settle down into a comfortable middle > > class lifestyle - that kind of gets in the way too. > > indians aren't the only people in the world who need to earn, get > married etc.
In India the pressure to marry seems to be orders of magnitude more intense than in the US or Europe. Wouldn't these same pressures that affect "open source" affect all kinds of altruistic or artistic pursuits? I've long wondered why there seems to be so little tradition of professional artists in India relative to what I was familiar with in the US. In the US many of my friends were artists, either full or part time. Here, I don't see that so much - and I've actively sought out artists here. I can easily see my children going into the arts, but I don't see the same sort of attitude or possibility here for kids of most techies or other professionals. Could those reasons be similar to the reasons people might not be going into open source? > but there is a problem of relative earning capacities. > indians joining software companies as soon as they finish studying (and > studying for a short time, compared to people in many other parts of the > world) can earn several times what their parents earned. that's not the > case in the US, where the earning differential between open source > community participation and corporate life is smaller. indeed, i argue > that one reason germany is so strong in open source development is the > long student life, which gives people quite some time to participate in > the developer community, so that by the time they succumb to earning > pressures they are often able to earn a good living out of open source. Could the earning pressures also be different? Is there less tendency to measure success solely by how much money you make? -- Charles
