ANGALORE, India, Nov. 11 — Taking the case for Windows software to a crucial audience, Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, is set to begin a four-day tour of India today.

This country has an estimated half-million individual software developers, many of them writing programs for some of the world's largest corporations. Mr. Gates's visit, his third to India, comes as programmers around the world are being lured to join the so-called open-source computing movement, which favors the Linux operating system — available free or in low-cost software packages — over proprietary systems like Microsoft Windows.

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"India is a big bet for Microsoft," Rajiv Kaul, Microsoft's managing director in India, said last month in announcing Mr. Gates's visit. "India's unbeatable developer strength has ensured that we are in the top slot for Microsoft globally."

Software developers are the people who write applications that work with a given operating system. And their support is crucial to Microsoft.

"Microsoft is a marketing machine," said Satyen H. Parikh, "hooking developers by offering them hundreds of shrink-wrapped packages off the shelf, ready to be deployed, along with a variety of goodies." Mr. Parikh is managing director of the Indian unit of Borland, a provider of software tools for developing applications across platforms that can span Microsoft and Linux.

Among other recent measures, Microsoft recruited perhaps India's best-known software executive, N. R. Narayana Murthy, the chairman of a leading software exporter, Infosys Technologies, to endorse Microsoft's technologies in large newspaper ads. The headline on one quoted Mr. Murthy as saying: "When I saw Windows XP in action, I was amazed. How did Microsoft get hold of my wish list?"

Mr. Gates is scheduled to visit New Delhi, Bangalore, Bombay and Hyderabad. If previous visits are indicative, his trip will attract a fawning group of state chief ministers and federal political leaders lining up outside his hotel suites, waiting for a chance to meet with the world's richest man.

Recent actions by the government, however, have been less than adulatory. Just weeks before Mr. Gates's impending arrival, officials in India's Department of Information Technology in New Delhi leaked details of an effort called the Linux India Initiative. It is meant to promote Linux as a viable alternative to proprietary-based software for use in government departments, state governments and corporations.

But recently, Pramod Mahajan, the information technology minister, has declined to discuss the initiative. "I don't want to comment on Linux so close to Mr. Gates's visit," Mr. Mahajan said last week in a telephone interview from New Delhi.

Mr. Mahajan, whose office displays a large framed photograph of himself with Mr. Gates, a founder of Microsoft, on a previous visit, added: "Bill Gates is Bill Gates. He is a brand name. And I won't say anything controversial now."

Linux, a descendant of the Unix operating system that is distributed free and written and debugged by volunteer programmers, is capturing the imagination of the techie community. But unlike in neighboring China, where the government actively promotes open-source software, in India the democracy makes it difficult for the government to decree a blanket software policy.

So far in India, Linux is used on fewer than 10 percent of the country's personal computers and server computers. But the potential market for any operating system is huge: although the country is a leading global software exporter, there are only an estimated four million PC's in use here among the nation's billion people.

"India and China are the world's fastest-growing markets, making them attractive to multinational computer corporations," said S. Ramakrishnan, head of the software division of the Department of Information Technology.

Compared with the Western industrialized world, where the open-source campaign is nearly as much a philosophical issue as a monetary one, the appeal of Linux in a developing country like India could be mainly economic.

"India needs millions of copies of software," Professor Swami Manohar said. He added that if that number was multiplied by 5,000 rupees ($104), the price of a proprietary operating system, "the costs could run into billions — compare this to a low-cost alternative and the choice is obvious." Professor Manohar teaches in the department of computer science and automation at the Indian Institute of Science, which is located in Bangalore and is India's premier school for pure sciences and engineering.

But Microsoft's concerns could go beyond bargain-basement software. The earliest adoption of open-source software here, beginning more than a decade ago, was at India's military installations and sensitive research sites. India's National Stock Exchange now uses Linux for critical applications. And Hindustan Lever Ltd., India's largest consumer products company and a subsidiary of the British-Dutch conglomerate Unilever, is considering using Linux to build applications for data warehousing, inventory management and e-commerce.

Across the border in Pakistan, Linux is starting to be used for a host of projects in schools and government offices. "A few months ago, we asked all offices to move the servers to Linux," said Salman Ansari, an adviser to Pakistan's minister of science and technology in Islamabad. "Those who wanted to use other, more expensive software were permitted to do so only if they could justify it."

Microsoft has offered a few million dollars a year to the Pakistani government over a three-year period for all applications in government and education. The government is studying the offer.

While in India, Mr. Gates is widely expected to pledge a large donation to public health projects through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But Microsoft India's executives hasten to note that the foundation's activities are distinct from those of the corporation.