Most projects I have been involved with were related to my PhD at that time, numerical computing kind of stuff in python. Going to the conferences in Europe or the US, it is already quite exciting because you see a lot of people, in academics and otherwise, using the softwares you contributed to. You make some tasks more enjoyable because the tools are more powerful, etc...

Now, in India, the dynamics are really different. You don't just do something that make people life simpler. You really enable people to do things they may not have been able to before. When the de-facto standard software costs one year of a post doc in India, having open source alternatives do make a difference.