Outsourcing and open source: A match made in...?

You went from one vaguely described experience with an Indian CSR to the generalization that all foreign support staff are inferior to US-based staff. That's doesn't really make sense, but it's not surprising since this is has become a template for columnists - "I called so-and-so company and got transferred _over there_ then demanded I speak to a U.S. engineer who solved all my problems. ergo foreign tech workers are inferior, therefore outsourcing is bad."

Anyway, you then move directly to the premise that U.S based coders deliver a superior product to coders from other countries, without any supporting arguments. Why is open-source development in Mumbai inferior to that in San Diego?

"There are two cores to any open source business: excellent code and superior service. Outsourcing one or the other is sheer stupidity."

Maybe you just wrote this off the cuff, but this missive is borderline racist. And the really crumby thing is that I see this formula repeated by tech writers nearly every day.

I think you might have missed my point. The experience with the Indian support person merely started me thinking about outsourcing, generally. I wasn't trying to say that my experience is analogous, i.e., all outsourcing stinks, all Indian outsourcing stinks, etc.

As for outsourcing open source, you definitely missed my point. Because open source is all about source of code, you must have your developers in house. When a customer calls Red Hat, they want Alan Cox and crew backing up the support call, not someone outside the company. My comment has NOTHING to do with the nationality of the coder - it has everything to do with whether that support person is a core developer on a given project.

So, please take my comments in the spirit in which they were written. I'm saying you can't outsource the lifeblood of any company. in the case of open source, that lifeblood is the people committing code to one's project. Not racist. It could be an Indian company running the project - in that case, it would be asinine for that company to outsource its development to an American firm, a British firm, or any firm outside the walls of its own office.

Matt

Fair enough, point taken. I did miss your point, which is very valid, about the importance of having core developers in-house, where support for a given client usually means customizing the core product. It would be very difficult / impossible for an open source shop to try to run support operations remotely, whether in India or Hawaii or wherever. Support / Development does overlap a lot in these shops.
I just tend to have a knee-jerk reaction when I see posts starting off the way you started off yours - It's true that there are barriers that foreign-based CSRs have to get through to deliver a quality experience to the client, but sometimes I feel commentators on outsourcing are (maybe) inadvertently slurring these hard-working people, when it's the whole process that's still nascent and will ultimately get better.

No worries. The good news is that Indians, Costa Ricans, Brits, etc. are all equally annoyed with Americans and others for other things. I just got back from Costa Rica where I was the ugly American, speaking English to Spanish-speakers. I can be frustrated when I can't understand people in my own country, but they're equally frustrated when I come to theirs and don't do an even passable job of speaking their language. Translation: I'm a bozo. :-)

As for India, I've worked with Indians in the US and in outsourced relationships. My general impression is that the US would do well to have 95% of the Indian population move to the US and take over our technology industry. I have no bias against Indian skills; if anything, I'm biased in India's favor on that score.

Open source and outsource are in-extricably intertwined, by the very virtue of the open source model. Open Source by definition implies that code can be contributed by anyone who has an interest in the product.

Open Source support is another issue. If you are buying open source support, then you have reason to expect that the organization you are purchasing support from has that support operation under it's control. That is still not to say that the support may not be located in another country. But if you are purchasing a product, where a key part of that product is clear communication, you expect that support to be as effective as if it was locally sited. Providing personal with adequeate communication skills is the responsibility of the organiztion you are paying. This is not to say that personal in foriegn countries do not have adequate communication skills. It is saying the company you are buying support from, should know how to communicate with you. Otherwise, shop elsewhere.

Years ago I used to work at a company that had a "Chinese Army". A group of sharp engineers living in California who contributed greatly to the product. When you talked to them about a problem, you had to listen carefully so you could understand what they were saying, in spite of the accent and unusual sentence construction. However when one of these individuals received a phone call from an associate from his home country, you understood one word, then the rest was in Chinese. These people had no trouble communicating. Just you had trouble communicating with them.
Their job was providing a product, not necessarily explaining their work in detail. But when you are purchasing what is essentially clear communication, that is another story.

What really annoys me is the way major companies always try to get more value for less money. The result is that I get loads of mail from offshore developers with as subject 'Urgent' and starting with 'Hi Lowagie, ur soft is fantastic, but I have few questions'.
If I dare respond to such a mail, I am in for a long correspondence. It turns out that the developer is a complete newbie and in the end, I get the complete list of requirements, including the name of the American company that ordered the software.
In this case, I send a mail to that company with the advise that paying a little bit more money for good developers is not a luxury; it's a must. I also tell them that offshore companies should invest more in the education of their developers. I wonder why I never get any replies to these mails *LOL*

Note that this is about offshore developers, not about Indian developers. I am very happy to see that there are some Indian developers on my mailing list that do a serious effort to answer questions and to contribute to solutions. When I read Matt's post, I never had the impression that he had anything against a specific nationality; he was only talking about some actual problems with oursourcing.

If you are really interested in nationalities, I recently made a little statistic based on some figures harvested from my webserver (I host a F/OSS project).
Webalizer tells me that for every 100 unresolved IP addresses, 71 hits were generated from a .com, 55 from a .net, 14 from a .de (Germany) and 12 from .jp (Japan). India (.in) only comes on the 14th place, for every 100 unresolved IPs, only 3 hits have their origin from an Indian IP adress.
But when I look at an other statistic, I see completely different numbers. For every 100 hits generated from a Google.com query, there are 16 hits from google.co.in, 15 from google.de, 12 from google.fr, 10 from google.it, and so on.
Webstatistics are not an exact science, but does this mean that lots of indian developers are using my software, but most of them don't live and work in India? Maybe I should try and tune my statistics so that I get a better picture...