The recent announcement by Jane Silber, chief executive officer, Canonical that, “India is one of the countries where Ubuntu is most successful and well received. We see significant growth in Ubuntu adoption in India.
Over the last year we saw 160 per cent growth. So, we believe that there is real potential and demand here. I would like to make special mention of our partners because this is done with them. So we can go to the market through our OEMs.” For the open source community, adoption of FOSS in India indeed bodes well for the growth of this platform.
Commenting on Ubuntu’s growth in the country, Silber said that though clear statistical numbers are unavailable “as Canonical does need its users to register,” inference drawn from the security updates, downloads and other such analytical. Besides, Canonical OEM partners in India recommend that Ubuntu’s growth can become larger “with proper marketing and education.”
In anticipation of reaching out to Indian users who are looking for easy to use software and technology, Silber said that, “We want to reach out to people who want a simple, easy-to-use, secure computing experience. Frankly, we want to reach out to people who don’t care much about operating systems. We are pretty strong already among the people who care about operating systems. In the big scheme of the world, people who go to a website and download an operating system and install that on their computers form a relatively small number. This makes our initiative particularly significant because we want to reach out to a whole new audience … the mass consumer audience … and it’s important for Ubuntu to sustain our growth and it’s important for companies like Dell and other OEMs as well. We work with others besides Dell because it helps them bring an open solution to a larger number of people.”
Recognizing that Indian user’s currently adopting Ubuntu look for seamless and cost-free technology that also gives them a cutting-edge when they are using competitive software, Canonical with OEMs is crashing in on the retail space with their Ubuntu pre-loaded machines. The high-participation of the Ubuntu community in the country too has contributed significantly to propel Ubuntu to its present high adoption status in the country.
India is already a global hub in software technology services and Ubuntu as much as the open source platform has been a core-competency of developers from the times of UNIX and its predecessors. The increasing growth of Ubuntu has first of all been because of the encouragement from regional as well as federal government in India, in implementing open source technologies, for the delivery of their services.
With right software environment, newer generations of users are becoming familiar with Ubuntu as much as with proprietary software and are willing to look beyond limited licensing software towards open licensed software to develop. Therefore, Canonical with its bevy of OEMs is poised rightly, in India, to break the glass-ceiling as such, and penetrate common use – as much as at home as at office.
