Friday, August 03, 2012: Yes, it may be hard to believe but it's a fact. With the increasing adoption of open source technology in India, companies in India are willing to hire open source talent but they find dearth of good open source professionals. Talent crunch is one of the major issues faced by the companies. CollabNet is one such company, which constantly looks for engineers with exposure in open source technology. Speaking to EFYTimes.com, Karthi Swaminathan, vice president, site operations and engineering, CollabNet, said, “It's just one out of ten candidates that we find come with exposure in open source technology. Number of people contributing to open source community is very less. There are a lot of people who have tried or experienced open source as consumers but really few people who are actually contributing to the open source technologies. There are jobs for the open source professionals but there are less takers or should I say adequate talent to fill those jobs.”
But Swaminathan is hopeful about the situation improving in the coming years. He said, “If we look at the situation 5-6 years back, the level of talent available for contributing to open source was minimal and we were one of the pioneers in that space. We had engineers who contributed to the Subversion project big time. One of the first committors of Subversion is from Asia. He is now an employee of CollabNet. But of late, things have changed. We are starting to see people making a lot of contribution to the source codes of various open source projects whether they do it as a part of their job or for their interest is immaterial.”

Companies like CollabNet value open source professionals better than others in the industry. Swaminathan explains, “I believe exposure in open source technology adds value to their profiles. Open source technology makes them better engineers and gives them an edge over the others.”