This is all about `catch them young' unofficial corporate programme. The freeware like Linux with various support groups has taken a lead from the proprietary software companies - Microsoft et al - in terms of popularity among the Indian student community.

"No major software company can survive in the long run unless it can create a band of dedicated developers wedded to a particular platform. The academic-IT industry cooperation in various technology institutes is mainly to make the future developers work on a particular platform and so when they join the industry or set up their own start ups, the students will build future products only on the platforms they learnt," said Mr Roshan D'Silva, chief executive officer, MyZus Infotech Services Pvt Ltd.

But with the coming of Linux, the free operating system and host of free tools and applications, the software companies have found a new competitor in the Indian technology institutes. Suddenly, these companies have realised that the free software movement has become very close to the heart of the students. "In IIT Mumbai, the technology students work on Linux and every year around 400 developers come out from the institute with knowledge on Linux.

Said Mr Prakash Advani, CEO, FreeOS.com, "The inquisitive minds of the students always want to play around the technology and in Linux with open source code, one can really go inside the software and understand the logic of the software, which is not possible with platforms like Windows. This is perhaps one of the reasons why students love Linux." But does this mean that the days of getting new developers for the proprietary software are over?

Industry observers believe it will be too premature to come to this conclusion. "Ultimately what will happen is that companies like IBM will port all their applications on Linux and students will have the options to decide whether an IBM applications are good on Linux or Windows. It is really difficult to say what Microsoft will do with its products like SQL Server, the database software. But in the long run students will have plenty of options to choose from," said Mr Mayank Jain, chief technology officer, righthalf.com, a startup company.

In the last few years, companies like Microsoft and IBM have taken many initiatives to sponsor various academic projects in the areas of computer science and telecommunication. The sponsorship extends from setting up a academic chair or providing proprietary tools and software at a subsidised rate. For example, Microsoft has academic programmes like University Advanced Training Labs (UATL) and Advanced Academic Training Programmes (AATA). Every year the software major spends lot of resources and money on these programmes targeting premium institutes like IITs and IISc and regional engineering colleges located in various states. "

The main idea is to make the students conversant with the Microsoft computing environment and create good technologists," said a Microsoft spokeswomen.

According to Microsoft, the company heavily subsidises the various certification programmes. "Our certification courses cost 60 per cent less than what is priced outside India. It is difficult to give exact figure on the amount we spend on various academic programmes," said the Microsoft spokeswomen.

But despite all these efforts, the new entrepreneurs of the new economy who are fresh out of the college are finding free software very dear to their business interests. With the help of dedicated Linux users through out the world, to find a driver or a compiler to drive an application is very easy and that too at no cost. "For young developers like us who want to develop good products but don't have the resource to buy costly tools, Linux is the saviour. You develop an application on this platform and then easily port it to other platform," added Mr D'Silva.

With Caldera, Suse and Red Hat becoming active in the Linux support market and a number of Linux communities always out to help across different cities, software companies may find it hard to entice new student developers to work only on their platforms.