Cheap hardware, free trips to the United States and all the popcorn you can eat--life's a junket if you're a computer programmer in India.
In their tussle to dominate the emerging industry for Internet-based services, industry giants Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are doling out incentives as they woo programmers worldwide to back their rival software.
The courting is particularly competitive in India, where by some estimates more than 10 percent of the world's programmers work for some of the industry's lowest wages.
"They keep contacting us and say 'spend time with us," said Shanti Sivakumar, a co-founder of iTech Workshop, which writes software for the healthcare and communications industries.
At stake is the nascent market for Web services, which will allow companies to do business over the Internet.
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