Nuchem is a company in Delhi that develops and sells water/effluent treatment technologies, chemicals and laminated panels. Sudev Barar, its owner, has adopted a Linux-based open-source computing environment. He tells Sopan Joshi why it makes sense for industry to adopt open-source software

On adoption of computers
I joined the family business in the early 1980s, when the personal computer (pc) revolution had begun. I remember buying a product called pc Junior, with 64 kilobytes of memory and two floppy drives, for Rs 80,000 in 1985. We found the computer very useful for accounting jobs. Billing accuracy was an attraction.

On learning to handle computers
I had no formal training. But as a manager who had expections from operations, I was interested in what computers offered.I remember the joy of seeing the ibm xt, perhaps the first with an internal hard disk drive of 10 megabytes