Currently, a thread raging on the FOSS.IN mailing list asks the question:

“What is stopping Indian FOSS Contributors?”

Lots of theories, lots of finger-pointing.

In all that, the answer is actually quite simple:

What’s stopping Indian FOSS Contributors is the number of advocates, who just talk, and don’t contribute a single line of code.

Everyone, from a young guy just out of college (or still in it) to an old guy like me – everyone just talks, advocates, makes wise speeches and doles out big dollops of advice on how to do things.

But not a single line of code to be seen.

Just lots of talk.

This is the true malady that faces the Indian FOSS world – too many wannabe RMSs, to few actual developers contributing.

On the other hand, look at the few FOSS contributors we *do* have in India (including FOSS.IN/2006′s opening keynote speaker, Suparna Bhattacharya, Anjuta’s Naba Kumar, KDE’s Sirtaj Singh and Pradeepto Bhattacharya, etc.). You will never see them on mailing lists acting wise by preaching the holy word of FOSS. They just quietly contribute, work with all the FOSS developers around the world, and earn their respect not by preaching, but by doing.

My excuse is that I am no longer a developer (I stopped writing code in 1994), but I do contribute with action and facilitation. Or, as I often say with tongue in cheek – “I don’t write code, I write people”.

But young people in (or just out of) college have no such excuse.

So guys, how about stopping the RMS emulation, and firing up your text editors and writing some code instead?

As I said during FOSS.IN/2006 – in the end, it is “Free and Open Source SOFTWARE“, and someone needs to *write* that software. Waxing eloquently about freedom and how to do FOSS is *not* a functional replacement to actually writing and contributing code.

So guys, stop talking.

Show us (and the world) the code.