Linux has made its presence felt in the West, and also has a lot advantages for the Indian corporate and the academic world. The greatest advantage of Linux over other operating systems is that it is free. Even all the development tools bundled with it are free. In India, one of the reasons for low penetration of computers is the total cost of ownership. Out of which the most tangible ones are the cost of hardware and software, the other costs being the cost of services and administrations.
Software piracy is rampant in the country.
Most companies don t care about legal software as they can get the pirated version of the same for a negligible amount. And those who bother to use a licensed version get away by using a single software license for all the computers in the office. Thus we see that software piracy prevails in India, primarily due to the fact that the cost of software is not affordable. If you look at the book industry, it has managed to curb piracy to a great extent by having affordable paper back edition of books which otherwise cost 10 to 20 times more in the West. The software industry has to yet to adopt this model.