I’m not sure how accurate StatCounter is, given that most Linux users use adblockers. However, according to it, Linux has almost a 14% desktop share in India.
It’s a little puzzling to me that Linux isn’t popular in low-income countries. Why wouldn’t it be the OS of choice there? Do we need to become linux missionaries? I imagine it would be easier to convince people who can’t buy an iPhone to use FLOSS than those who can drive to an Apple Store and waddle over to get yet another one.
Because poor people don’t want to spend time maintaining their os. Windows is maintenance free but everything in Linux requires a lot more steps that usually dive into the command line.
You don’t do maintenance, you have to reinstall everytime something goes wrong after spending hours reading bullshit answers to a simple question on Microsoft forums. At least that’s my experience with it.
If India is anything like my country (Brazil), corruption is rampant and enforcement outside business environments is pretty much non-existent, so, no, no one is afraid of piracy for domestic use. We used to have street vendors and booths on strip malls selling all kinds of warez on CD/DVD. The only reason they’re not around anymore is because internet speeds here are already good enough that downloading is easier. And no, no one will cut you connection because of it, our congress already approved laws saying that access to digital communication is a civic right.
They don’t choose. Choice is something to make when people have enough time and resource. Instead they use what they are familiar with and have little time to grab and learn a new thing.
Free software comes with an implicit cost while pirated Windows doesn’t, ironically.
Two reasons, low income means no culture of paying for software, and easily corrupted government and administrations which companies like Microsoft have no problem taking advantage of to push their products to city halls, schools, hospitals, universities etc.
I don’t think many people buy windows, laptops already comes with it and ones how can build a pc already know how to get windows for free, as far as iPhone goes, why would any one choose floss if they can’t afford iPhone? They usually choose Google services
They know little about open source. Microsoft is exclusively in schools and government, and that is what they grow up with. They probably know more about pirating Windows, than using Linux legally. There is also a good kick-back in terms of MS license mark-ups for middle-men businesses. One would hope there is some mandatory education around different OSs as I’m sure kids would love to explore and modify software.
Linux and FLOSS unfortunately don’t have budgets, and rely on logic and common sense. Microsoft has a big lobbying budget, gets in to see senior politicians and decision-makers, and then sponsors training, digital villages, etc. Yes, it costs a country overall much more than Linux, but it is easier for schools/gov depts and middle-men make some actual money in their pockets. That’s what Linux and FLOSS end up against. What would turn it around is having strong local businesses driving training and making tender bids to install and support Linux and FLOSS. A government or school wants to have it done for them. That’s the reality, unfortunately.
For once, Redhat and Suse do have market share, because they are companies. Other distros not so much. Then the reliability of the numbers, since you can only guess it from downloads and useragents.
I would assume that “market share” is related to the relative number of units sold/number of active subscriptions/fraction of total sales in terms in revenue, or some similar metric. I run a variety of different distributions on servers (bare metal, VMs and containers) and desktop computers. Do they all count equally? Without giving it more thought, I wouldn’t even know how to determine the market share of Ubuntu in my own home in a sensible way.
With Windows, I can just count the number of active licenses. Oh wait, its zero.
I don’t know much about this CHWTIA. But I do know someone who works at Capgemini, can you tell me why they are considered exploitative? Genuinly curious.
Underpay and overwork their Indian workers like a motherfucker.
Return to office is mandated back to 5 days a week and 9 hours a day minimum at some of these places. The company makes bank but the workers get cents on a dollar.
We use TCS and Accenture at my work and I’m aware of us using Cognizant and HCL as well. You’re bang on fuck all those companies and also “first world” compankes for fucking the local employment market and fucking overseas workers.
Race to the bottom. Nothing matters but the bottom line.
When you’re ready to go back to the job market, I recommend you to join a company that develops a product. Not a service company that will sell you like fresh meat to its clients, like the one you listed.
Do you have any interest in relocating outside India? You seem to have a good domain of English and softskills on top of some Linux. I wouldn’t mind taking a look at the personal projects you mention
Hey, thank you for this comprehensive feedback! I’ve emailed the guix-devel mailing list to draw attention to your critique because I think it’s important.
Many Indians simply type English on the internet, because foreigners cannot understand Hindi. However Indians among themselves often use Hindi, just like Chinese, Russians, those who speak Spanish, Esperanto or Portuguese (Brasil). That does not mean those languages have less speakers, they are just not visible on “western corporate” internet.
Well, l*wda is also sexist and misandrist, and used just as often, and so are mixed slurs like bkl or mkl. Every culture has these kinds of slurs. And it will be decades before that changes in India, or any country, because “westernisation” will no longer gain cultural traction, as it is beginning to hurt many people brazenly.
As a MoS&E student in northern Europe I’d love to hear why these companies have such a bad rep over in India. They’re doing massive recruitment drives at my uni (along with BCG) and sponsor a lot of student events, so I don’t hear many bad things about them.
…because they just throw people at projects with no regard to skill set or level. Their business model is get contact, hire lots of tech grads, assign them to project, cross fingers. They’ve ended up with a reputation of not being able to execute, and they doing it by paying people at the start of their career the lowest amount they can. If you end up on one of these projects, and are actually capable, then everything gets heaped onto you.
Ah, makes sense then why they’re pushing so hard to have a presence at our universities. Hopefully I’ll be able to avoid such employers in the future. Thanks for the heads up!
Also to add the Indian market is so saturated any “good one” you get knows their worth and dip out at the first opportunity. Leaves giant companies left holding the bag on a model that has skeleton crews containing all the tacit knowledge with no means to do anything. “Oh well just bring in vendors to do xyz” ignoring the operational cost going forward. The current business model employed by fortune 500 companies was and is unsustainable. Great for their bottom line though.
I’m not sure adblockers change the OS they report. Other tools I know for a fact do it.
Edit: However, as @aebletrae mentions, adblockers don’t have to change what OS is reported to change the overall statistics. They explain how in a comment below.
I think the assumption is not that adblockers alter the user agent info, but that they also block other resources, so StatCounter won’t see those users at all, leading to under-reporting.
That’s because even a grey market Windows key costs US$20 nowadays and that’s over ₹1,600. For comparison purposes, the largest Indian banknote is ₹500.
How is that passible? Don’t they have an extra word for “100.000” because they deal with such high numbers because of their currency? How can the largest banknote be 500 there?
The Government demonetised ₹1000 and ₹2000 banknotes a few years back as part of a campaign against “black money”. The Government’s thinking was that criminal organisations hoarded large amounts of cash in these large-denomination notes, and by forcing everyone to deposit the notes immediately into the bank, it would bring light to the flow of money.
It was not particularly successful and mostly all it did was lead to a week of chaos and long queues outside banks.
Is this real and safe? Why is Microsoft letting it be hosted on their own platform?
I looked at the code but the “single file version” is 10377 lines of Batch. They want me to do the power shell equivalent of curl abc.com | bash. The official website looks legit but I have no idea if this is safe or how they’re doing it.
Downloading the script and checking if it’s the same script as the one on github is definitely better. Or running the curl but on raw.githubusercontent.com adress, because then you can be pretty sure it’s not something else than you see.
These are the most well-known activation scripts that many people trust. They are well documented and often recommended, with more than one contributor. Written in powershell, I believe that if they were malicious, some of the 46k people who starred the repo or 4.8k people who forked it would notice. That being said, you can only be sure if you read the code, which is luckily not that difficult in the powershell script case. I personally trust them, definitely more than I trust Microsoft itself :D
…but not legal. Being poor doesn’t necessarily mean you’re inclined to break the law. Besides, Linux is useful if you perhaps want to later get a job in the tech field.
It’s of questionable legality. It’s not illegal as in “piracy”, but the seller, or whoever obtained that key from Microsoft, is violating their agreement with Microsoft by reselling the keys.
You could also just download the ISO from MS directly and use it without activation. It’ll only prevent you from changing the theme and wallpaper, but you could just change the registry entries directly or use a third-party tool to change your wallpaper/theme.
And no BitLocker (without fiddling around even more)? No, thanks.
There’s no way Microsoft can win this moral battle, they’ll profit off you enough with all their tracking, have you seen the atrocious setup screen at installation they put you through?
Do you want to ads?
Do you want to a keylogger?
Do you want to get tracked?
Do you want to get fucked?
Yes, please, daddy GatesNadella
(Sorry, can’t help myself from sounding like a nutjob when Microsoft gets into the equation)
Votebank politics, blind nationalist ideology, backward superstitions, “patrons”, favouritism, nepotism, &c. Indian politics is flawed in many ways but that is a discussion for another time.
I absolutely agree that Linux is great and I genuinely hate Windows for number of reasons. The problem is that some people just have to use Windows. This might include me in a few days, because I’m in high school and we have to install Solidworks. I think that for these people, Windows Activation Scripts are a good option that is safe (like it’s not a virus), is free (because I don’t want to pay for OS that I’m forced to use for some reason) and is safe in the meaning that there is no way of legal consequences if you are an individual, AFAIK. Also the licenses from 3rd party websites are often stolen licenses and buying them is IMO worse than activating Windows using the scripts, since you are supporting scammers.
You really need to learn to read properly. What I’m saying is that being poor on its own does not incline people to commit crime. You read it as “People commit piracy if and only if they are poor”, which is the only statement under which your reply and its implications would be logically sound.
Is being poor correlated with piracy? Yes. But I argue the much bigger factors are the lack of availability of legitimate methods of acquiring software in India as well as the difficulty of acquiring such legitimate copies, even when they are available. There are also cultural differences that make piracy more acceptable in India than in other places, such as Europe or North America.
Think of it like this: a hypothetical 13-year-old child in the United States who wants a video game and sees it on Steam for 60 USD may consider piracy, but is much more likely to save up for it and buy it legitimately when they get a Steam gift card for their birthday or ask their parents for it for Christmas. Their parents can easily go to Walmart or Amazon and buy a copy. Meanwhile, a child in India who sees the same game for sale for the equivalent of 5,000 INR will know that is firstly a ludicrous amount to save for, and secondly, may not be available in their region, and thirdly, lacks the ability to simply ask for it for their birthday or something. Gift cards don’t seem to be too common in India. A person living in India is also less likely to have access to banking infrastructure that allows for easy electronic payment. Even things bought on Amazon have “cash upon delivery” available as a payment method. That is how undeveloped India’s payment infrastructure is. Meanwhile in the USA, every teenager has their own bank account and debit card. As a result, the Indian teenager is more likely to pirate. But it is not solely because they are poorer.
Kid searches the game piracy website and finds it.
Kid downloads and plays the pirated game
Every kid does this and you know it. People don’t consider downloading things off of internet as some sort of a moral test or a criminal action. And software piracy is just in paper in some countries.
It’s not that shallow. You are trying to use an anecdote, and not even a concrete anecdote, to argue a matter of statistics. The anecdote isn’t even illustrative of any point. It is utterly disconnected from any statistical argument. It is not logically sound and you should know that. We’re talking about how many people pirate things, not whether any given person pirates something. What you have argued in your comment is, “there exists a set of circumstances where a person could reasonably be driven to commit piracy”. That is neither persuasive to your thesis nor particularly enlightening.
I really wish rhetoric was taught as a standard subject in grade school. It must not be where you’re from.
You’re not breaking the law, you’re breaking a software license agreement. That does not automatically make it a crime, at least, that would depend on your exact local laws, and the lawyer’s interpretation of it - in many cases the actual wording around this is ambiguous and could be argued both ways. A better term for it would be a “legal grey area”, which means if you’re a company then don’t f*** around with it, and if you’re just a random user then no one gives a f***.
In any case, if those scripts were truly illegal, then the Microsoft-owned Github wouldn’t host them in the first place. Clearly Microsoft themselves don’t have an issue with it, so why should anyone else care about it?
Yes, you are breaking a law. Copyright infringement in this manner is an offence under the Copyright Act 1957 punishable with up to three years imprisonment and a fine.
But you’re not infringing on any copyright. You’re downloading a copy of Windows directly from Microsoft legally, and then activating it using a free and open-source script hosted on Microsoft’s own servers. You aren’t breaking any copyright law in doing that.
That’s how it should work, but creating a derivative of a copyrighted work, through modification, even if it is for personal use, is technically illegal in the US.
Was, but no longer is. It is officially discontinued, making the ₹500 note the largest for now. I would expect the Government to quickly launch a new large-denomination note. India is still a largely cash society and the largest note being worth 6 USD is surely going to be inconvenient for everyday citizens.
I haven’t found a reliable system that gets around activation (had a friend ask me recently) and I personally can’t live with the watermark, but I also have sensitive data on my machines and networks so I don’t risk getting a sketchy iso from tpb with activation nuked.
Works great, is well documented and trusted. If I remember correctly it has multiple ways of activating stuff and you can select the one you want with explanation and pros/cons of each method.
EDIT: Documentation is here: massgrave.devAnd it can even activate Office or change Windows edition.
While it is free to download it, the license still costs. Though they seem to let you use it unlicensed for an unlimited amount of time with some restrictions (like not being able to change the background image and an ever present watermark). At least this was true for windows 10. No telling if/when they will drop that feature though, especially if loads of people start using it unlicensed like that (though I doubt that has any effect on people using it that way or not).
Microsoft never gave a shit about private piracy barring some noteable examples from countries with very strict anti-piracy laws like germany. The tactic has always been to get everyonem on windows and then make the big bucks seeling the OS to enterprises, because everybody wants to use windows, since they’re at least halfway competent at that
Now, it’s my opinion that people, en masse, can’t use computers to save their fucking lives anyways and whether they’re too stupid to utilize windows or too stupid to utilize Linux doesn’t make much of a difference, but boy do the people get angry when anyone suggests switching off windows
I hope no one gets offended, but is there anyone who can explain why the indians say “Sir” like that? I mean, it’s so characteristic, I don’t criticize it, I’m just genuinely curious.
In addition to what they said, it is considered rude in some parts of India (TN, Andhra, Telangana, even Gujarat to some extant) to bluntly say no. People who don’t know these social cues may take a no as a yes. And people from these states are over-represented in the US.
It’s due to the nature of social interactions in India (more broadly, South Asia).
In most of our native languages, we don’t directly address someone by their name, unless we’ve been acquainted before (sometimes even after, if it was just a formal acquaintance). We add a little something for politeness and respect. So it’s always ‘firstname’-ji or ‘lastname’-ji, for example, in Hindi.
Since there isn’t a direct carry over for this in English, people adopted sir or ma’am as replacement.
That’s more or less it. It’s about respect when interacting with someone else.
You’ll notice that people who have been brought up in or are more familiar with western culture don’t really do this.
EDIT: Unless ofcourse, your question was regarding the accent. In that case, most south asian written scripts lack certain soft tonal pronunciations of English alphabets, so most conversions result in hard sounding words, due to which you get the characteristic Indian (or again, more accurately, South Asian) accent.
For those who know a bit of Japanese, its similar to the honorifics system in that language as it stands now. The origins have been discussed by others (class system by the British and all), but this is how it is currently used, at least in my experience.
Indians push these self-aggrandizing lies everywhere on the internet, from reddit, youtube, to quora and facebook. And with their population propping up these posts you have to take everything with a bucket of salt.
The top post is saying people don’t pirate Windows there because it’s illegal, like what??? go to any piracy based forums, telegram channels, and groups, it’s full of them.
I don’t buy the piracy thing either but your proof is bad because there are so many Indians that they will always overwhelm in sheer numbers even if it’s a small percentage of the whole population
Not sure about the colonial mindset or the caste practices of centuries but Indian culture is extremely hierarchial in almost all facets of life. Elders, seniors, higher officials, etc all expect to be respected even if it is just one year difference, etc.
One of the ways to show respect it to not use names and call as sir,madam, teacher, officer or at best elder brothers/sisters for college seniors. All this works well in the regional languages of India but sounds weird in English.
Directly calling names of elders is still seen as bad and if needed would use their name appended with sir madam uncle aunt etc.
This is less practiced in IT field in my experience. After years of schooling and college calling my teachers sir and maam it was hard to shake off the habit. A few of my managers had to remind me a bunch of times to call them by their name and not as sir / maam in the beginning. Even then I avoidedcallintg out their names and just started speaking to get their attention. Now I almost call everyone by name by default in office setting. It is still fun when freshers join and are asked to use names of 15+ year elders and them wondering if we are joking.
Just tossing a guess, would love for someone who actually knows to chime in though: in their language they’re probably taught to refer to strangers with the respective word for “sir” as a formal construct, so they apply the same to English even though the culture is different, because they will probably be taught this way as sometimes happens, school teachers don’t actually pass on the cultural uses/ways of talking of the countries where the language is spoken alongside the language itself, so it’s easier to stick to plain translation in some cases
Add comment