BANGALORE, INDIA: An avid photographer, a passionate open source and web technologist, and the founder of Apache Tomcat and Ant, James Duncan Davidson, during his second visit to India and the first to Bangalore, sat down for a brief interview for CIOL on the sidelines of the Spark IT 2011. Excerpts:

CIOL: What made you to go for the names Apache 'Tomcat and Ant'?

James Duncan Davidson: While I was sitting in my office in Cupertino, to write Tomcat, I was staring at the empty screen and thinking what to name this project so as to save it in the directory.

As I was thinking, I saw a few books kept on my shelf, which had animals on its cover.

That made me think that if someone actually wrote a book on the thing that I was working on, which animal would I want on its cover.

For some reason I landed on Tomcat. Tomcat is a small cat that is crappy and can defend for itself. Thus I named the directory as 'Tomcat' and entered my source code into that.

Then came along Ant. The same thought process went in. I wanted an animal that builds things, since not many animals build. Whereas, ants build pretty big cities down the earth. Thus I created a directory and called it 'Ant'. That is how the names came into being.

CIOL: What is exciting to you about Indian software community?

James: Outsourcing has created a strong IT software industry here. The most interesting thing about Indian market is its huge resource pool. Every skill set that you need is right here. It will be interesting to watch how the Indian developer community takes its next step in terms of innovating.

If at all anything is lacking in terms of innovation, it is not the technical talent, definitely. Developers need to start taking the initiative and not wait for financial, emotional or other kind of support. These will come along.

Today, with several infrastructure and power projects coming up, there are innumerable opportunities in wait for local software developers.

I'm also excited to see what will happen as local Internet access continues to increase its penetration level, both in terms of number of people as well as speed. Local software developers need to rise to cater to this market and provide applications that will give users the access to new services, essential to the local market.