BANGALORE, INDIA: Prabhu Sunderaraman, software mentor and corporate trainer, DuraSoft talks with CIOL about open source and its challenges, his latest book and SPARK IT.

How do see the growth of open source software in comparison to proprietary software amongst Indian companies?

Huge number of companies have started using Open source softwares in the past few years.

One of the main reasons is the low cost benefits Open source softwares offer for the Indian companies. The other reason I see is the flexibility they offer in terms of choosing a solution for their projects.

Do you see the demand for open source developers increasing rapidly world-wide?

Yes, definitely.

How do you see the adoption of open source in enterprise community?

Slow and skeptical. Many companies require customized enterprise features such as integration with SAP etc., many open source solutions don't provide that. So eventually they land up paying and using products that can provide these features.

Lack of factors like 'support' after the project goes live, frequent updates, trainings etc acts as deterrents in adopting them.

Open solutions for free? It's a myth!, this is what most of the people have to say. What is your opinion?

Partially true. The scary part of adopting open source software is the support. The software is free but the support is expensive or sometimes not available at all in a lot of cases.

Could you share with us a few details about your book, Spring 3.0 Black Book?

Spring 3.0 Black book is targeted at the hardcore developers who want to churn out some good amount of code in Spring 3.0.

This book is fully loaded with plenty of complete applications that can be implemented easily. It will have a lot of easy to understand examples in Spring 3.0. The book is written keeping the Indian developer community in mind.

According to you how an event like SPARK IT enables software developer community to have a good career growth?

Events like Spark IT provide excellent opportunity for developers to get an overview of the upcoming technologies. They get to clearly see where the industry is headed to, in terms of technology. I have seen people choose technologies for their projects based on what they learn from a conference like this.

Also it provides a chance for them to interact with a lot more fellow software developers and share ideas.